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SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY - January 2019

Jan 2019

May 11, 2021

NASA Spacecraft Starts Trip Back to Earth after Collecting Asteroid Samples

A NASA spacecraft, which scientists believe has collected samples from an asteroid, began its two-year journey back to Earth.
NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is attempting to complete a mission to visit Bennu, a skyscraper-sized asteroid some 200 million miles (320 million km) from Earth, survey the surface, collect samples and deliver them back to Earth.
Staff celebrated at the OSIRIS-REx control room in Colorado as the space vehicle pushed away from the asteroid, whose acorn-shaped body formed in the early days of our solar system.
OSIRIS-REx arrived at Bennu in 2018.
The spacecraft found traces of hydrogen and oxygen molecules - part of the recipe for water and thus the potential for life - embedded in the asteroid's rocky surface, said Dante Lauretta, the OSIRIS-REx mission's principal investigator, in 2018.
The trip back to Earth will take about two years. The spacecraft will then eject a capsule containing the asteroid samples, which NASA says will land in a remote area of Utah.

May 10, 2021

China's Biggest Rocket Long March 5B lands in Indian Ocean

Remnants of China's biggest rocket landed in the Indian Ocean, with the bulk of its components destroyed upon re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere, according to Chinese state media, ending days of speculation over where the debris would hit.
Parts of the Long March 5B re-entered the atmosphere at 10:24 a.m. Beijing time (0224 GMT) and landed at a location with the coordinates of longitude 72.47 degrees east and latitude 2.65 degrees north.

Co-Win Introduces 4-digit Security Code Mandatory for Online Vaccine

Admitting data-entry error in marking many people who have booked vaccination slots as 'vaccinated', the Union health ministry on Friday said the Co-Win software through which registration and vaccination slot booking is taking place will have some additional security feature. Upon booking vaccination slots on cowin.gov.in website, people will receive a four-digit security code which will have to be produced at the vaccination centre.
The code will also be mentioned on the digital certificate, the ministry said.
The additional security feature has been introduced as many people received messages claiming that they have received one dose of the vaccine, while they did not actually turn up for the vaccination on the scheduled date.

May 09, 2021

Chinese Rocket Debris Set for Re-entry

Remnants of China's largest rocket launched last week are expected to plunge back through the atmosphere late Saturday or early Sunday, European and U.S. tracking centres said.
China's foreign ministry said on Friday that most debris from the rocket will burn on re-entry and is highly unlikely to cause any harm, after the U.S. military said that what it called an uncontrolled re-entry was being tracked by U.S. Space Command.
EU Space Surveillance and Tracking (EU SST) said that its latest prediction for the timing of the re-entry of the Long March 5B rocket body was 190 minutes either side of 0211 GMT on Sunday.

May 07, 2021

IBM Unveils World's First 2-Nanometer Chip Technology for Faster Computing

For decades, each generation of computer chips got faster and more power-efficient because their most basic building blocks, called transistors, got smaller.
The pace of those improvements has slowed, but International Business Machines Corp on Thursday said that silicon has at least one more generational advance in store.
IBM introduced what it says is the world's first 2-nanometer chipmaking technology. The technology could be as much as 45% faster than the mainstream 7-nanometer chips in many of today's laptops and phones and up to 75% more power efficient.
The technology likely will take several years to come to market. Once a major manufacturer of chips, IBM now outsources its high-volume chip production to Samsung Electronics Co Ltd but maintains a chip manufacturing research center in Albany, New York that produces test runs of chips and has joint technology development deals with Samsung and Intel Corp to use IBM's chipmaking technology.
The 2-nanometer chips will be smaller and faster than today's leading edge 5-nanonmeter chips, which are just now showing up in premium smartphones like Apple Inc's iPhone 12 models, and the 3-nanometer chips expected to come after 5-nanometer.

May 06, 2021

World's Largest Aeroplane

The world's largest aeroplane, designed to transport hypersonic vehicles and facilitate easy access to space, soared into clear skies over California's Mojave Desert. The company Stratolaunch designed it to transport hypersonic vehicles and facilitate easy access to space.
The aircraft named 'Roc' features a twin-fuselage design and the longest wingspan ever flown, at 385 feet (117 m), surpassing the Hughes H-4 Hercules flying boat of 321 feet (98 m). The Stratolaunch is intended to carry a 550,000-pound payload and will be able to launch rockets from high altitude.

World's First Artificial Intelligence Ship

Mayflower 400 is the world's first artificial intelligence ship.
It is 15 metres long and weighs nine tonnes. It is basically a trimaran.
It navigates with complete autonomy.
The ship is to study marine pollution and analyze plastics in water. The voyage is important because more than 80% of the underwater world remains unexplored.
Sophisticated cameras and radars will act as the eyes and ears of the ship. There are six cameras in the ship.
Till now, the ship is capable of handling waves that are fifty metres high.
The team is to monitor the ship twenty-four hours from England.
The ship is covered with solar panels.

Astronomars Discover 8 Milli Second Pulsars

A group of astronomars has discovered 8 milli seconds pulsars. These pulsars are located within the dense cluster of satrs called 'Globular Clusters'. The pulsars were discovered using the MeerKAT telescope located in South Africa.
The Milli second pulsars are the most compact stars known to mankind. They spin up to 700 times per second. They are much rarer than the slower spinning pulsars. The milli second pulsars are those pulsars whose rotational period is less than ten milli seconds.
The Mmlli second pulsars are made of neutrons.
They are the most extreme objects in the universe with a diameter of about 24 kilometres.
Their mass is hundreds of thousands of times the mass of the earth.
It is a Karoo Array telescope with sixty-four antennas. Also, it is a radio telescope. It is located in the Northern Cape of South Africa. It is soon to be expanded to MeerKAT+ by installing twenty more antennas.

SpaceX Starship Rocket Prototype Achieves First Safe Landing

SpaceX achieved the first successful touchdown of its prototype Starship rocket during the latest test flight of the next-generation launch vehicle in south Texas, after four previous landing attempts ended in explosions.
The feat marked a key milestone for the private rocket company of billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk in its development of a resusable heavy-lift launch vehicle to eventually carry astronauts and large cargo payloads to the moon and Mars.
The Starship SN15 blasted off from the SpaceX launch site in Boca Chica, Texas, along the Gulf Coast and reached its planned maximum altitude of 10 kilometers (6 miles), then hovered momentarily before flying nose-down under aerodynamic control back toward Earth.

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