General Awareness

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY - January 2019

Jan 2019

Apr 04, 2022

Leh to Sign Tripartite Agreement to Develop Hanley as Dark Sky Sanctuary

Leh Administration will sign a tripartite agreement to develop Hanley as Dark Sky Sanctuary and Leh Hill Council, WildLife and Tourism departments wouldjointly develop the area for Astrotourism.
The State WildLife Development board has increased the frequency of meetings for early clearances of various projects and compensation fee is increased and the wildlife agencies are instructed to release compensation within 15 days, in case wild animals cause injuries to domesticated cattle.

Spacetech Start-up Pixxel Launches 'Shakuntala' Satellite with Elon Musk's SpaceX

A SpaceX rocket carried a low-orbit imaging satellite built by Bengaluru-headquartered startup Pixxel into space, a first for the company to place a slew of satellites in space to track earth phenomena, particularly climate change. Weighing under 15 kg, the satellite can pack 10 m in a pixel, exceeding by a third the specificity of comparable launches by ISRO, NASA, and others, said Pixxel.
The satellite can beam down data relating to deforestation, melting of ice caps, gas leakage, crop health and other data critical for climate change assessments.

Apr 03, 2022

Hubble Spots most Distant Star ever Seen, 28 Billion Light-years Away

The Hubble Space Telescope has glimpsed the most distant single star it's ever observed, glimmering 28 billion light-years away. And the star could be between 50 to 500 times more massive than our sun, and millions of times brighter. It's the farthest detection of a star yet, from 900 million years after the big bang. Astronomers have nicknamed the star Earendel, derived from an Old English words that means "morning star" or "rising light."
This observation of Earendel could help astronomers to investigate the early years of the universe.
When the light that we see from Earendel was emitted, the Universe was less than a billion years old; only 6% of its current age. At that time it was 4 billion lightyears away from the proto-Milky Way, but during the almost 13 billion years it took the light to reach us, the Universe has expanded so that it is now a staggering 28 billion lightyears away.

Apr 01, 2022

NASA Astronaut Mark Vande Hei Back on Earth after Record-breaking Mission

Vande Hei, who lived in space for 355 consecutive days, setting a new record for the longest single spaceflight by an American astronaut, arrived in Houston at NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC). As per NASA protocol, Vande Hei was then flown back to Houston to start his recovery from living for nearly a year in microgravity.
Vande Hei's mission surpasses the previous single-spaceflight mark by a U.S. astronaut, which was Scott Kelly's 340-day excursion in 2015-16. The overall single-spaceflight record of nearly 438 continuous days is held by Russian cosmonaut Valery Poliyakov, who was on the Soviet-Russian Mir space station between 1994 and 1995.

Mar 30, 2022

Petascale Supercomputer PARAM Shakti at IIT Kharagpur Dedicated to the Nation

PARAM Shakti", a Petascale Supercomputer "at IIT Kharagpur, was dedicated to the nation under National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) – a joint initiative of Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and Department of Science and Technology (DST). PARAM Shakti supercomputing facility is accelerating the research and development activities in multidisciplinary domains of computational and data sciences as it provides large-scale computing power to the user community of IIT Kharagpur and neighbouring academic and R&D institutes.
A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between IIT Kharagpur and Centre for Development in Advanced Computing (CDAC) in March 2019 to establish this state-of the art Supercomputing Facility with 17680 CPU cores along with 44 GPUs.
The new high-performance computational facility would aid researchers to solve large-scale problems of different fields of Science and Engineering. Some of the identified focus areas in which this supercomputing based research will be of great value addition are: Computational Fluid Dynamics, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data Analytics, Climate Change & Digital Earth, Computational Biology, Cryptography & Security, Smart Infrastructure & Sustainable Cities, Smart Materials etc.

Mar 29, 2022

IIT-Mandi, Researchers Find Method to Convert Plastic into Hydrogen, Useful Chemicals

The researchers of the Indian Institute of Technology, Mandi, produced new photocatalyst that converts plastic to hydrogen and other useful products. The researchers developed a method that can transform plastic into hydrogen when exposed to light. The researchers said that the generation of hydrogen from plastics is particularly useful because the gas is considered the most practical non-polluting fuel of the future.
Plastics, most of which are derived from petroleum, are not bio-degradable, which cannot be easily broken down into harmless products.

Mahatma Gandhi's Granddaughter Launches a Website 'Modi Story'

The granddaughter of Mahatma Gandhi Sumitra Gandhi Kulkarni inaugurated the Modi Story website which is a collection of stories from Prime Minister Narendra Modi's life. Modi story is a volunteer-driven initiative to bring together inspiring moments from Narendra Modi's life, as narrated by his co-travellers.
The people who are associated with him closely recollected their memories about the works of Mr Modi. Several prominent personalities, including Olympic gold medalist Neeraj Chopra, classical dancer Sonal Mansingh, actor-cum-politician Manoj Tiwari, former Finance Secretary Hasmukh Adhia and spiritual leader Swami Avdheshanand Giri, have contributed to the anecdotal compilation.

ESA-NASA's Solar Probe Snaps Closest-ever Photo of Sun

European Space Agency's (ESA) and NASA's Solar Orbiter snapped images of the Sun in unprecedented detail.
One of the images, taken by the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) shows the Sun's full disc and outer atmosphere, the corona in the highest resolution image ever taken. Another image, taken by the Spectral Imaging of the Coronal Environment (SPICE) instrument, represents the first image of a full Sun—the first-of-its kind in 50 years. It was taken at the Lyman-beta wavelength of ultraviolet light that is emitted by hydrogen gas.
The high-resolution telescope of EUI takes pictures at such high spatial resolution that, at that close distance, a mosaic of 25 individual images is needed to cover the entire Sun. Taken one after the other, the full image was captured over a period of more than four hours because each tile takes about 10 minutes, including the time for the spacecraft to point from one segment to the next.

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