Space, IT related: KSLV, Luna Glob, Black Beauty, COMET, SKA, SAGA-220 (Jan, Feb 2013)

Telescopes

#1: Square Kilometre Array (SKA)

• world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope
• will be 50 times more sensitive, and be able to survey the sky 10,000 times faster, than any imaging radio telescope array previously built.
• will be completed in 2024
• Location: South Africa + Australia.
• Benefit: developments in many technology areas, including antennas, signal transport, signal processing, computing, software and data archiving
• India is actively involved in this project

#2: Solar telescope, Solar winds

• Will be built in the Ladakh region of Jammu and Kashmir .
• It’ll have capability to do both day and night astronomy.
• Will help in understanding sunspots: process of their creation and decay.
• Sunspots pose a threat to the communication system on earth as well as space satellites.
• Increased sunspot activity=> increase in the outflow solar wind.
• Solar wind contains charged particles that can interfere with the operation of satellites by introducing what is called background static.
• Solar winds also interact with atoms in the upper part of earth’s atmosphere, wreaking havoc with the communication systems on ground.
• Satellites in low earth orbit face greater risk as during periods of heightened solar activity.

Space mission related

#1: Luna Glob

• Russia will launch this robotic lunar mission in 2015.

#2: KSLV-1

• Korea Space Launch Vehicle-1 (KSLV-1)
• South Korea will launch this satellite and gain entry to an elite global space club that includes Asian powers China, India and Japan.
• Earlier, South Korea couldn’t launch satellite program for many years, because its main military ally the U.S., feared S.Koera’s arms race with N. Korea.

#3: Pishgam

• name of Monkey that was recently sent to space and returned back, under Iranian space mission.
• In Farsi, Pishgam = Pioneer.

IPK

• original kilogram — known as the International Prototype Kilogram or the IPK.
• It is made up of platinum-based weight.
• All other measurements of mass are set against this IPK model.
• Problem: This kilogram has become heavier as contaminants have built up on its surface.

Black Beauty

• It is a 320 gram space rock from Mars.
• Discovered in Morocco’s Sahara Desert in 2011
• It contains more water than any other Martian meteorite previously found.
• could unlock vital clues to the evolution of Mars

Black beauty: Rock from Mars

IO: the moon of Jupiter

IO	Moon
Jupiter planet has 5 major moons.IO is the innermost of them.	Earth as only one moon.
Has many active volcanoes. In fact, most volcanically active body in the solar system	No
Smaller than our moon	bigger than IO
Jupiter has a few natural satellites orbiting it	Doesn’t have any natural satellites orbiting it.

COMET online monitoring system

• Communication Plan for Election (COMET) is made for use of Election Commission.
• It is a high-tech SMS-based alert system.
• Officials on the election duty just need to punch in a few letters to send various coded SMSes.
• The information is instantly available online and can be used by the Election commission and poll officials in the state capital and district.
• It also helps in monitoring events down to a particular polling booth at the click of a mouse, for example

1. When did the staff reaching the polling station
2. voting percentages every two hours
3. did the poll party reached safely at the EVMs deposit centre or not?

India’s IT Development

HEC-2M	First computer in India (imported from UK) in 1955. Installed @ Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Calcutta.
70s	networks such as NICNET and the Very Small Aperture Terminal (VSAT),
80s	Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) was developed by ECIL and Bharat Electronics.
LPG reforms (90s)	Led to rise of private players such as Infosys, Wipro, Satyam.
SAGA-220	Supercomputer built by ISRO @Vikram Sarabhai space centre.
PARAM	Supercomputer built by C-DAC, Pune.

Ubuntu

• Open source operating system (OS) Linux for computers.
• Android = Google’s open source operating system for smartphones and tables. (based on linux)
• Now Ubuntu is also coming to tablet platform.

petabytes

a peta is a million billion or 10 raised to power 15

MillatFacebook (MFB)

• Pakistan’s version of Facebook.
• website was launched after the Lahore High Court banned Facebook after some members started a `Everybody Draw Mohammad Day’ competition.
• objective was to provide a platform for all Muslims and “nice, decent and sophisticated people of all religious and faiths” to come together and make a network.

Direct-to-Home (DTH) movie release

• one of the controversies surrounding Kamal Hasan’s recent movie.
• Kamal Haasan wanted to release his movie Viswaroopam on DTH platform as a pay-per-view screening a day ahead of its intended theatre release. (=you can watch it on your dish tv, tata sky etc.)
• But Theatre owners and distributors said DTH is not video piracy-proof and hence, if new movies are immediately shown on DTH= it will drastically cut ticket revenues.
• Kamal Haasan’s argument: It is not impossible to record the contents of a digital set top box. and he was just attempting to explore a legitimate source of revenue. Besides the single pay-per-view show priced at Rs. 1,000 per activation = mostly upper middle/rich class will watch. This will not hurt the business of theatre owners, because their target consumer base belongs to different income group.