General Awareness

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY - January 2019

Jan 2019

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.

May 27, 2022

NIT-T Commissions Param Porul Super Computer Centre, Becomes part of NSM

A supercomputer named Param Porul was inaugurated at NIT Tiruchirappalli under National Supercomputing Mission (NSM). The NSM is a joint initiative of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and the Department of Science and Technology (DST). Param Porul supercomputing facility is established under phase two of the national supercomputing mission to facilitate computational research.
The Param Porul is based on direct contact liquid cooling technology to obtain high-power usage effectiveness and thereby reducing the operational cost. Multiple applications from various scientific domains such as Weather and Climate, Bioinformatics, Computational Chemistry, Molecular Dynamics, Material Sciences, Computational Fluid Dynamics etc. have been installed on the system for the benefit of researchers.

May 26, 2022

Ransomware Attack Delays SpiceJet Flights

Low-cost Indian carrier SpiceJet came under ransomware attack, resulting in several of its flights getting delayed and cancelled. The airline said it was in touch with experts and cyber crime officials on the issue. The airline had earlier said the ransomware attack slowed down morning flight departures, but its IT team rectified the situation.
Many passengers said they were left waiting at the airport or stranded inside the plane with no updates from the airline. Incidentally, this comes just few days after SpiceJet said it hoped to start broadband Internet service on its planes soon.

May 25, 2022

Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw Successfully Tests Made-in-India 5G Call at IIT Madras

Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw made the first 5G call on a trial network set up at IIT Madras using indigenously-developed telecom gears. Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the country's first 5G test-bed, incubated at IIT Madras, to enable startups and industry players to test and validate their products locally and reduce dependence on foreign facilities.
The government expects commercial roll-out of 5G services to start in the country by August-September 2022.
The 5G test-bed has been developed as a multi-institute collaborative project by eight institutes led by IIT Madras. In the absence of a 5G test-bed, startups and other industry players were required to go abroad to test and validate their products for installation in a 5G network.

May 24, 2022

Indian Railways and IIT Madras Partner to Develop India's First Indigenous Hyperloop

The Ministry of Railways partnered with IIT Madras for the development of a made-in-India Hyperloop system. It has also announced that it'll be setting up a Centre for Excellence for Hyperloop technologies at the aforementioned institution. India has shown interest in Hyperloop tech since 2017, by then Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu. In fact, the ministry also held talks with US-based Hyperloop One, but nothing quite materialised.
IIT Madras's Avishkar Hyperloop which was formed in 2017 had been working on scalability and frugal engineering concepts for the development of a Hyperloop based transportation system for India. The group was one of the top ten finalists at the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod competition of 2019 and was the only Asian team to do so. They also were awarded the 'Most Scalable Design Award' at the European Hyperloop Week in 2021.

Hubble Observes Extremely Distant Globular Cluster

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captured an amazing new photo of the globular cluster Liller 1.
Liller 1 is located approximately 30,000 light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Scorpius.
Also known as C 1730-333, it lies within the Milky Way's bulge, the dense and dusty region at the Galactic center.
Liller 1 is a particularly interesting globular cluster, because unlike most of its kind, it contains a mix of young and old stars.
According to Hubble astronomers, globular clusters typically house only old stars, some nearly as old as the Universe itself.

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