(General Awareness For Bank's Exams) Science & tech
March - 2014

Prithvi II

• missileIndia has recently successfully test-fired its nuclear-capable Prithvi-II surface-to-surface missile from a military base in Odisha.
• The indigenously-developed ballistic missile with a maximum range of 350 km was fired from the Integrated Test Range at Chandipur in Balasore district, about 230 km from Bhubaneswar.
• The Strategic Forces Command (SFC) of the Indian Army conducted the test as part of a regular training exercise.
• Prithvi is India’s first indigenously-built ballistic missile. It is one of the five missiles being developed under the country’s Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme.
• The battlefield missile, with flight duration of 483 seconds and a peak altitude of 43.5 km, can carry a 500-kg warhead.
• The missile has features to deceive anti-ballistic missiles and uses an advanced inertial guidance system with manoeuvring capabilities and reaches its target within a few metres of accuracy.
• It has a higher lethal effect compared to equivalent missiles in the world.

IAF Super Hercules

•  A recent and most modern acquisition of the Indian Air Force from the United States, the C-130J Super Hercules military transport aircraft, crashed near Gwalior, killing all five IAF personnel on board.
• The wreckage of the aircraft was strewn along the Madhya Pradesh-Rajasthan border, near Karauli district, about 165 km from Jaipur. Those killed in the crash are Wing Commander Prashant Joshi, Wing Commander Raji Nair, Squadron Leader Kaushik Mishra, Squadron Leader AshishYadav (navigator) and Warrant Officer Krishnapal Singh (flight engineer), IAF officers said.
• The aircraft took off from Agra for a routine flying training mission. A court of inquiry has been ordered to investigate the cause of the accident.

GSLV Mark III

• India took the first step towards the liftoff of the experimental mission of its gigantic Geo-synchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle-Mark III when the rocket’s core stage, weighing more than 110 tonnes, was flagged off from the Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre, Mahendragiri, near Nagercoil, Tamil Nadu, to Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh.
• The significance of the mission is that it will be a forerunner to India sending its astronauts to space. For, the GSLV-Mk III in this flight will carry a crew capsule without astronauts. The capsule will return to earth with the help of parachutes. The mission will take place in June or first week of July.
• The Indian Space Research Organisation calls its mission to send Indian astronauts to space the Human Space Flight (HSF) programme.
•  GSLV-Mk III is the “muscular sibling” of GSLV-Mk II which has an indigenous cryogenic engine. GSLV-Mk III can put a communication satellite weighing four tonnes into geo-synchronous transfer orbit or a 10-tonne satellite into low-earth orbit.

Tiangong 2

• In 2015, China is expected to launch its next space laboratory.
•  Tiangong 2 will follow on from the Tiangong 1 module, which was launched in 2011 and is still in orbit at the time of writing.
• Tiangong 1 received two crews of astronauts and carried out China's first space dockings.
• It is a small, roughly cylindrical module with a crew cabin and a service module featuring solar panels. Although Tiangong 1 is officially designated as a "space laboratory", it is really a small space station.
• The launch of Tiangong 2 has been expected for a long time, but space analysts are puzzled by the nature of this spacecraft.
• Originally, China planned to launch three Tiangong modules, and Tiangong 2 was expected to be a marginally improved version of the Tiangong 1 spacecraft.
• Later, China seemed to drop plans for three Tiangongs and launch just two.

NASA Space Settlement Contest

•  Five girls from the city of Madurai have won the third prize in the Space Settlement Design Contest 2014, co-sponsored by NASA Ames and the National Space Society (NSS), under the Literary Merit category.
•  The girls from Sri SaradhaVidyalayam Matriculation Higher Secondary School, Madurai have bagged the prestigious prize for their fictional work titled 'Cronus-The Utopia'.
• The team is made up of Class XI students - SB VishakaNandini, M Shenbagam, K Kamali, P DhivyaPriya and SG Yogalakshmi. In the competition, they describe their idea of Cronus- a fictional space orbit of Saturn, as a human settlement in deep space in the year 2250 as a result of depletion of natural resources on Earth.

World's first 3D fingerprint

• A team of Michigan State University computer scientists led by Indian Institute of Technology(IIT) Kanpur alum Anil Jain have built the first three-dimensional model of a human fingerprint.
•  Jain, a University Distinguished Professor of computer science and engineering, and his team did was develop a method that takes a two-dimensional image of a fingerprint and maps it to a 3-D finger surface.
•  The 3-D finger surface, complete with all the ridges and valleys that make up the human fingerprint, is made using a 3-D printer. It creates what Jain's team called a fingerprint "phantom."
• While the 3-D model doesn't yet have the exact texture or feel of a real finger, it could advance fingerprint sensing and matching technology.

Commitment of Google to involve more women into technology sector

•  The Reserve Bank said that India is fully committed to bring in reforms in the over—the—counter (OTC) derivatives markets, but its pace and nature will depend on the domestic market conditions.
•  However, the pace and scope of reform implementation depend on the domestic market conditions and characteristics,” it said in a report on ‘OTC Derivatives Market Reforms’
•  In response to the financial crisis that began in 2008, G—20 had initiated a series of reforms designed to strengthen regulation and oversight of the financial system and tasked the Financial Stability Board (FSB) with coordinating the reforms and assessing their implementation.
•  In India, the OTC derivative products were introduced by RBI in a phased manner, keeping in view the hedging needs of the real sector.

The largest yellow star discovered

• An international team of astronomers has spotted the largest yellow star ever discovered, ranking among the ten largest stars found so far.
•  "Surprisingly large" was the term Olivier Chesneau and his international team used to describe HR 5171 A, a hypergiant star more than 1300 times the diameter of the Sun.
•  Using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope Interferometer, the astronomers determined that the yellow star is about a million times brighter than the Sun and 50% larger than the famous red supergiant, Betelguese.
•  This makes HR 5171 A the largest yellow star ever found, and one of the ten largest stars.

Nuclear fuel complex

•  Following the approval of the Cabinet Committee on Security, the country's second nuclear fuel complex will come up at Kota in Rajasthan. The Rs. 2,400-crore complex, next to the Rawatbhata nuclear plant, will have the facility to reprocess atomic fuel.
•  The Department of Atomic Energy has made the new arrangement, keeping in mind the growing demand for fuel required for nuclear plants. The complex will serve atomic plants which are proposed to be developed in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh; Haryana; Jaitapur in Maharashtra and Mithi Virdhi in Gujarat.
•  India's first nuclear fuel complex, developed at Hyderabad, does not have the capacity to meet the growing demands from reactors which will come up by the next decade. Also, under the 12th Plan, India aims to increase its nuclear energy generation capacity to over 17,300 MWe, from over 5,500 MWe now.

Nuclear reactor to yield plutonium

•  Iran and world powers locked horns over the future of a planned Iranian nuclear reactor that could yield plutonium for bombs as the United States warned "hard work" will be needed to overcome differences when the sides reconvene in April.
• Tehran's foreign minister voiced optimism that a July 20 deadline for settling a long-running dispute about the scope of Iran's nuclear programme was within reach.
• The meeting in Vienna was the second in a series that the six nations - the United States,China, Russia, Germany, France, Britain - hope will produce a verifiable settlement, ensuring Iran's nuclear programme is oriented to peaceful ends only, and put to rest the risk of a new Middle East war.
• Western nations want to ensure that the Arak reactor is modified sufficiently to ensure it poses no bomb proliferation threat. Iran insists that the desert complex be free to operate under any accord as it would be designed solely to produce radio-isotopes for medical treatments.

Zebra pattern in Earth's inner radiation belt.

• Scientists, using data from the twin NASA Van Allen Probes, have discovered a new, persistent pattern in Earth's inner radiation belt.
• The probes, which launched on August 30, 2012 as the Radiation Belt Storm Probes, were re-named in honour of physicist James Van Allen who, in 1958, discovered the radiation belts encircling our planet.
• The Van Allen Probes mission goal is to shed light on how and why radiation levels in the belts change with time.
• The radiation belts are dynamic, doughnut-shaped regions around our planet, extending high above the atmosphere, made up of high-energy particles trapped by Earth's magnetic field.
• Radiation levels across the belts are affected by solar activity, such as solar storms, and can ebb and flow.
• During active conditions, radiation levels can dramatically increase, which can create hazardous space weather conditions that harm orbiting spacecraft and endanger humans in space. .

X-Rays brighter than a million suns

• Scientists have for the first time ever created the brightest light ever imagined in the entire Universe.
•  X-rays brighter than a million suns were created which exposed the biochemical structure of a 50 million-year-old fossil plant to stunning visual effect when they were bombarded on it.
• The team of palaeontologists, geochemists and physicists investigated the chemistry of exceptionally preserved fossil leaves from the Eocene-aged "Green River Formation" of the western United States by bombarding the fossils with X-rays produced by synchrotron particle accelerators.
•  The work shows that the distribution of copper, zinc and nickel in the fossil leaves was almost identical to that in modern leaves. Each element was concentrated in distinct biological structures such as the veins and the edges of the leaves and the way these trace elements and sulphur were attached to other elements was very similar to that seen in modern leaves and plant matter in soils.
•  The data has led the team to conclude that the chemistry of the fossil leaves is not wholly sourced from the surrounding environment as has previously been suggested but represents that of the living leaves.  

Subsurface sea on Enceladus

•  By studying the gravitational pull exerted by Saturn’s moon Enceladus on the Cassini spacecraft, scientists have found that the moon could harbour a subsurface ocean of liquid water.
• NASA has said the discovery furthers “scientific interest in the moon as a potential home to extraterrestrial microbes”.
• On three occasions between 2010 and 2012, Cassini flew by Enceladus within 100 km, twice over the southern and once over the northern hemisphere. During these flybys, Cassini’s orbit was pushed and pulled by the moon’s gravity, indicating an uneven distribution of mass inside the moon.
•  Though the disturbances were small — 0.2-0.3 mm/second — scientists have been able to conclude that there is excessive mass about 30-40 km beneath Enceladus’ssouth pole, and a deficiency at the surface.
•  In 2011, a Jovian moon, Europa, was shown to harbour liquid water under an ice shell that covered the body’s entire surface. NASA has planned a mission to investigate Europa and allocated $15 million earlier this year to develop a mission.
• The Cassini robotic spacecraft was launched in 1997 by NASA, European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency at a cost of $3.26 billion to study the Saturnian system.

NASA Space Settlement Contest

•  Five girls from the city of Madurai have won the third prize in the Space Settlement Design Contest 2014, co-sponsored by NASA Ames and the National Space Society (NSS), under the Literary Merit category.
•  The girls from Sri SaradhaVidyalayam Matriculation Higher Secondary School, Madurai have bagged the prestigious prize for their fictional work titled 'Cronus-The Utopia'.
•  The team is made up of Class XI students - SB VishakaNandini, M Shenbagam, K Kamali, P DhivyaPriya and SG Yogalakshmi. In the competition, they describe their idea of Cronus- a fictional space orbit of Saturn, as a human settlement in deep space in the year 2250 as a result of depletion of natural resources on Earth.

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