General Awareness

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY - December 2018

Dec 2018

Mar 19, 2023

Chandrayaan-3 Spacecraft Capable of Handling Harsh Launch Conditions

India's national space agency ISRO reached a new milestone in the pursuit of a soft landing on the Moon, with the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft having successfully completed "the essential tests" that validated its capability to withstand the harsh vibration and acoustic environment that the spacecraft would face during its launch.
The tests were conducted in the facilities located at U. R. Rao Satellite Centre, Bengaluru.
These tests are an essential part of the qualification and acceptance process for any spacecraft.
The vibration and acoustic tests carried out on the integrated spacecraft have provided sufficient confidence about its structural integrity and survivability in the launch environment.

Mar 18, 2023

OpenAI Launches 'GPT-4' with Higher Accuracy

OpenAI, the artificial intelligence research company behind ChatGPT, unveiled its new and more advanced model called GPT-4. The latest version is more creative and accurate in its response and has better problem-solving capabilities than ChatGPT.
According to OpenAI, GPT-4 is a "large multimodal model", which cannot outperform humans in real-world scenarios but can exhibit "human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks".
OpenAI describes GPT-4 as its "most advanced system" which produces safer and more useful responses.
Unlike ChatGPT, GPT-4 can accept both text and images as inputs. It means that the AI system can generate a response to an image or inputs consisting of interspersed images and text. The new feature can be used to get captions for photos while users can also ask the model to describe or recognise a picture for them.

Mar 17, 2023

NASA Unveils New Generation of Spacesuit for Humanity's Return Trip to Moon

NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) unveiled a new generation of spacesuit for humanity's return trip to the Moon. The novel design of the spacesuit comes with specialist features to support astronauts as they conduct scientific experiments on the lunar surface. The prototype is said to be a better fit for female space travellers.
NASA said that it hopes to have the updated suit ready for the Artemis III mission to the Moon in 2025.

Mar 16, 2023

Active Volcano on Venus Shows it's a Living Planet

Choked by a smog of sulfuric acid and scorched by temperatures hot enough to melt lead, the surface of Venus is sure to be lifeless. For decades, researchers also thought the planet itself was dead, capped by a thick, stagnant lid of crust and unaltered by active rifts or volcanoes. But hints of volcanism have mounted, and now comes the best one yet: direct evidence for an eruption. Geologically, at least, Venus is alive.
The discovery came from NASA's Magellan spacecraft, which orbited Venus some 30 years ago and used radar to peer through the thick clouds. Images made 8 months apart show a volcano's circular mouth, or caldera, growing dramatically in a sudden collapse. On Earth, such collapses occur when magma that had supported the caldera vents or drains away, as happened during a 2018 eruption at Hawaii's Kilauea volcano.

ISRO Officials and Bhutan Government Inaugurate Ground Station of Indo-Bhutan Satellite

Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chairman S. Somnath, Bhutan's Foreign Minister Lyonpo Tandi Dorji, Bhutan's Minister for Information and Communication Lyonpo Karma Donnen Wangdi and Ambassador of India to Bhutan Sudhakar Dalela inaugurated a Ground-Earth station for the India-Bhutan satellite in Thimphu.
The ground station of the India-Bhutan Satellite, built in Thimpu, is also known as the ISRO Nano Satellite 2 for Bhutan (INS-2B).
It was launched as a payload on ISRO's PSLV C54 rocket on November 26, 2022.
It has been jointly developed by scientists from both countries.
The satellite contains two payloads:
NanoMx multispectral optical imager: It is developed by India'sSpace Applications Centre (SAC). It will provide high-resolution images to Bhutan for its natural resources management.
Automatic Packet Reporting System (APRS) repeater: It is jointly developed by Department of Information Technology and Telecom (DITT) Bhutan and ISRO's UR Rao Satellite Centre (URSC) to serve the amateur radio community, relaying realtime information about the region.

Mar 15, 2023

Honeywell International Names Vimal Kapur as CEO

Diversified manufacturer Honeywell International Inc named Vimal Kapur as Chief Executive Officer (CEO). He would succeed Darius Adamczyk on June 1.
Kapur, currently Honeywell's president and chief operating officer, had previously headed its building technologies unit.
Adamczyk, who became the company's CEO in 2017, will continue to serve as its executive chairman.

NASA Awards Firefly Aerospace $112 Million Contract

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) picked US-based rocket builder Firefly Aerospace for an important $112 million contract. The NASA contract is for the delivery of multiple lunar payloads to the far side of the moon in 2026. It is part of NASA's efforts to put humans on the moon.
As per the Firefly Aerospace website, this is the second task the firm has won under NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative.

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