Current Affairs News For Aspirants
India’s remote sensing satellite Cartosat-2 has become operational and started beaming images from the earth’s lower orbit, a space official said on 17 January 2018.
“Cartosat-2 has been operationalised and beamed the first image on 15 January 2018 after it was launched and deployed in the earth’s lower orbit on January 12.
What
- The first image in high resolution shows a part of Indore, about 200 km from Bhopal in central India. As one of our earth’s observatory in the Cartosat-2 series, the spacecraft has become operational after it was injected into a sun-synchronous orbit at 505 km above the earth.
- The 710 kg spacecraft was launched on board a polar rocket (PSLV-C40) along with 30 satellites including one nano and micro from India and 28 from six countries.
- As a follow-on mission, Cartosat will also relay high resolution scene specific spot imageries with data from its panchromatic and multi-spectral cameras operating in time delay integration mode. It has a 5-year life span.
- The Cartosat-2 imagery will be useful for cartographic applications, urban and rural applications, coastal land use and regulation, utility management like road network monitoring, water distribution, creation of land use maps and change detection to bring out geographical and man made features.
- The 10 kg nano-satellite and 100 kg micro satellite are also functioning and have started relaying data from their respective orbits to our receiving stations.
- The micro-satellite is the 100th spacecraft the state-run space agency had launched and deployed around the earth orbit. The micro-satellite was also placed in the sun synchronous orbit 359 km above the earth after the space agency’s mission control had fired the rocket’s engines to restart its fourth stage for the intended orbit.
- The first space mission in 2018 onboard the PSLV-C40 comes four months after a similar rocket failed to deliver the country’s eighth navigation satellite in the earth’s lower orbit on August 31 last year.
A group of divers has connected two underwater caverns in eastern Mexico to reveal what is believed to be the biggest flooded cave on the planet, a discovery that could help shed new light on the ancient Maya civilization.
The Gran Acuifero Maya (GAM), a project dedicated to the study and preservation of the subterranean waters of the Yucatan peninsula, said the 347-km (216-mile) cave was identified after months of exploring a maze of underwater channels.
What
- Near the beach resort of Tulum, the group found that the cave system known as Sac Actun, once measured at 263 km, communicated with the 83-km Dos Ojos system, the GAM said in a statement. For that reason, Sac Actun now absorbs Dos Ojos.
- GAM director and underwater archaeologist Guillermo de Anda said the “amazing” find would help to understand the development of the rich culture of the region, which was dominated by the Maya civilization before the Spanish conquest.
- It allows us to appreciate much more clearly how the rituals, the pilgrimage sites and ultimately the great pre-Hispanic settlements that we know emerged.
- The Yucatan peninsula is studded with monumental relics of the Maya people, whose cities drew upon an extensive network of sinkholes linked to subterranean waters known as cenotes.
- Some cenotes acquired particular religious significance to the Maya, whose descendents continue to inhabit the region.
Maharashtra has come out with a public cloud policy virtually mandating its departments to shift their data storage onto the cloud, creating a $2-billion opportunity for the industry.
What
- The policy, which is a first by any State,will result in additional private sector investments as government is one of the biggest creators and consumers of data.
- It will create a $2-billion opportunity for the industry. Every single government department uses data storage. Now, they will not have to buy boxes. We have made it sort of mandatory.
- Government departments currently have their own data storage facilities, which can be done better and cheaper by private sector vendors.
- The government had formed a four-member committee to draft a policy framework on cloud usage two months ago, which submitted a policy document that’s being now adopted as the public cloud policy.
- The policy is likely to be formally set in motion through a detailed government resolution. In the next 20 days, five to six top cloud service providers like Amazon or Microsoft will be empanelled.
- Under the framework, government will make it mandatory for the data to be stored within the country and the broad idea is to use public cloud in cases wherever the Right to Information Act is applicable, and then go in for enhanced security features for private and sensitive data, which will also be stored on the cloud.
- Additional investments to come into the Mumbai Metropolitan Region because of the new policy.
- The region already supports a good number of datacentres and dvantages like availability of uninterrupted power, presence of academia and talented human resources make it an exciting pocket to be in for the industry.
