General Awareness

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY - January 2019

Jan 2019

Jun 03, 2022

The First Liquid Mirror Telescope in the Country and the Largest in Asia - Commissioned Atop Deva...

India commissioned a unique liquid-mirror telescope atop a mountain in the Himalayan region that will keep a watch on the skies to identify transient or variable objects such as space debris, asteroids, supernovae and gravitational lenses. It is the country's first and Asia's largest liquid-mirror telescope. The telescope, built by astronomers from India, Belgium and Canada, is located at an altitude of 2,450 metres at the Devasthal Observatory campus of Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES) in Nainital district, Uttarakhand.
The telescope will help in surveying the sky, making it possible to observe several galaxies and other astronomical sources just by staring at the strip of sky that passes overhead.

ISRO Chairman Inaugurates New Spacecraft Manufacturing Facility

Dr. S. Somanath, the chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), inaugurated ANANTH Technologies' spacecraft manufacturing unit at Karnataka Industrial Area Development Board (KIADB) Aerospace Park. The new state-of-the-art spacecraft manufacturing facility can conduct assembly integration and testing of four large spacecraft simultaneously.
This is a first of its kind facility in India, adding that since its establishment in 1992, Ananth Technologies has contributed to the manufacturing of 89 satellites and 69 launch vehicles built/launched by ISRO.

Jun 01, 2022

Super Hygroscopic Polymer Film Can Harvest Water from Arid Air

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin developed a low-cost polymer film made of renewable biomass and hygroscopic salt that can extract atmospheric water in arid environments; these materials cost a mere $2 per kilogram, and a single kilogram can produce more than 6 liters of water per day in areas with less than 15% relative humidity and 13 liters in areas with up to 30% relative humidity.
This new work is about practical solutions that people can use to get water in the hottest, driest places on Earth. This could allow millions of people without consistent access to drinking water to have simple, water generating devices at home that they can easily operate.

May 31, 2022

US-built 'Frontier' Now World's Fastest Supercomputer

US-built supercomputer titled 'Frontier' dethroned Japan's 'Fugaku' (developed by the Riken Institute and Fujitsu), as the world's fastest machine with 1.1 exaflops of performance on the 59th TOP500 list published by an international conference of computer experts. The Frontier supercomputer at the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is the first to achieve an unprecedented level of computing performance known as exascale, a threshold of a quintillion calculations per second. Frontier features a theoretical peak performance of 2 exaflops, or two quintillion calculations per second, making it 10 times more powerful than ORNL's Summit system.
More than 100 members of a public-private team worked around the clock, from sourcing millions of components to ensuring deliveries of system parts on deadline to carefully installing and testing 74 HPE Cray EX supercomputer cabinets, which include more than 9,400 AMD-powered nodes and 90 miles of networking cables.

May 29, 2022

Two Indian Satellites to be Part of BRICS 'Virtual Constellation'

India and China are a step closer to working together in space after a joint commission on space cooperation for the BRICS bloc was established at a meeting of the top space agencies of Brazil, Russia, India and China.
Two orbiting Indian satellites Resourcesat-2 and 2A will be part of the "virtual constellation of remote sensing satellites", a data sharing mechanism among the BRICS countries.
The BRICS remote sensing constellation will be made up of six existing satellites contributed by the space agencies of BRICS countries including the CBERS-4, jointly developed by Brazil and China, Russia's Kanopus-V-type and China's Gaofen-6 and Ziyuan III 02.

May 28, 2022

NASA's Latest Mars Craft Nears Landing for Unprecedented Seismic Mission

NASA's first spacecraft built to explore the deep interior of another world streaked toward a landing scheduled on a vast, barren plain on Mars, carrying instruments to detect planetary heat and seismic rumblings never measured anywhere but Earth. After sailing 301 million miles (548 million km) on a six-month voyage through deep space, the robotic lander InSight was due to touch down on the dusty, rock-strewn surface of the Red Planet. If all goes according to plan, InSight will hurtle through the top of the thin Martian atmosphere at 12,000 miles per hour (19,310 kilometers per hour).
The stationary probe, launched in May from California, will then pause for 16 minutes for the dust to settle, literally, around its landing site, before disc-shaped solar panels are unfurled like wings to provide power to the spacecraft.
InSight will spend 24 months - about one Martian year - using seismic monitoring and underground temperature readings to unlock mysteries about how Mars formed and, by extension, the origins of the Earth and other rocky planets of the inner solar system.

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