General Awareness

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY - January 2019

Jan 2019

Feb 11, 2022

New Record in Nuclear Fusion Energy

The prospect of harnessing the power of the stars has moved a step closer to reality after scientists set a new record for the amount of energy released in a sustained fusion reaction.
Researchers at the Joint European Torus (JET), a fusion experiment in Oxfordshire, generated 59 megajoules of heat – equivalent to about 14kg of TNT – during a five-second burst of fusion, more than doubling the previous record of 21.7 megajoules set in 1997 by the same facility.
The feat follows more than two decades of tests and refinements at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy and has been hailed as a "major milestone" on the road to fusion becoming a viable and sustainable low-carbon energy source.

TCS Launches Clever Energy and two Other Sustainability Solutions

IT services major Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) announced the launch of a new suite of offering for sustainability solutions consisting of TCS Clever Energy, Intelligent Power Plant (IP2) and TCS Envirozone on Microsoft's Azure IoT platform to help organisations gain insights into energy usage, and reduce waste and emissions to accelerate towards their net-zero goals.
TCS Clever Energy platform leverages IoT, AI, machine learning and cloud to help organizations understand intricate energy performance factors, enabling them to become more sustainable and empowering leaders to make informed decisions without compromising business needs.

Feb 10, 2022

Geomagnetic Storm Sends 40 SpaceX Satellites Plummeting to Earth

A powerful geomagnetic storm doomed 40 Starlink satellites launched by SpaceX last week.
Elon Musk's company launched a Falcon 9 rocket bearing the 49 satellites from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on (Feb. 3), but a geomagnetic storm that struck a day later sent the satellites plummeting back toward Earth, where they will burn up in the atmosphere.
Geomagnetic storms occur when a surge of solar wind — charged particles from the sun — smashes into Earth's magnetic field and generates charged particles and currents in Earth's upper atmosphere.

Feb 09, 2022

ISRO Discards Communication Satellite INSAT-4B in Space

Amid the growing concern over junk in outer space, the Indian Space & Research Organisation (ISRO) successfully disposed of one of its satellites after it completed its operational life in orbit. The INSAT-4B underwent Post Mission Disposal (PMD) at the end of its service.
INSAT-4B is the 21st Indian Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) satellite to undergo post-mission disposal, the required propellant for such re-orbiting was included in the initial fuel budget as a part of standard practice followed in ISRO's GEO mission planning.
INSAT-4B was launched in March 2007 for DTH and other communication services.

Lockheed Martin Wins NASA Contract to Bring Mars Samples Back to Earth

Lockheed Martin's space division won a NASA contract to build the rocket that will return the first Mars rock samples to Earth in the 2030s.
The small, lightweight rocket will be the first to take off from another planet, bringing back rock, sediment and atmospheric samples from the surface of the Red Planet.
NASA's Perseverance Rover has been collecting samples from various Martian areas since landing on Earth's neighbor a year ago.
The goal of the mission is to find traces of ancient life on the Red Planet. But these samples will have to be analyzed in laboratories back on Earth, capable of more sophisticated tests than anything that can be done on Mars.

Feb 08, 2022

NASA will Retire International Space Station in 2031

According to NASA, the International Space Station will continue its operation until 2031 and then crash into an uninhabited area in the Pacific Ocean known as Point Nemo. It will be replaced with three free-flying space stations to continue the work after ISS's retirement. NASA also selected Houston-based Axiom Space to provide the ISS's first commercial module.
The International Space Station was the brainchild of former US President Ronald Reagan, who in 1984 proposed building a permanently inhabited spacecraft in cooperation with a few other countries. In 1998, the first piece of the space station, a control module, was launched into space onboard a Russian rocket. About two weeks later, a crew onboard the US' Endeavour space shuttle attached the control module with another part, the Unity node.

Unnikrishnan Nair Becomes Chief of Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre

Distinguished scientist and launch vehicle specialist Dr. S Unnikrishnan Nair took charge as the director of Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC).
VSSC is a key space research centre of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and specialises in rocket and space vehicles for satellite programs.
Nair, who started his career in VSSC Trivandrum in 1985, has made significant contributions in launch vehicle mechanisms, acoustic protection systems and payload fairing areas during his tenure.
Nair has BTech in Mechanical Engineering from Kerala University, ME in Aerospace engineering from IISc, Bengaluru and PhD in Mechanical Engineering from IIT(M), Chennai.
In January 2019, Nair took over as the first director of Human Space Flight Centre, Bengaluru, which is spearheading the Gaganyaan programme. He will continue to hold this position along with his new role at the VSSC.

Rogue Black Hole Spotted on its Own for the First Time

Astronomers may have for the first time detected and measured the mass of an isolated stellar-mass black hole, a new study finds.
Previous research suggested that when giant stars more than 20 times the mass reach the end of their lives, they usually die in catastrophic explosions known as supernovas, and their dense cores are expected to collapse to become black holes.

Feb 07, 2022

Google Launches New Chromebook Devices for Teachers, Students

Tech giant Google introduced a new line-up of secure and sustainable Chromebook devices, along with updated programmes, resources and Chrome OS advances, built entirely for education.
The company said that Chromebooks play an important role in the classroom, helping 50 million students and teachers learn and collaborate from wherever they are.
On our new Chromebook discovery page, you can easily search for device capabilities like graphic design and lesson planning. You can also find which Chromebooks have features like LTE connectivity, improved video conferencing and camera-based document scanning.

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