SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY AFFAIRS JULY 2013

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY AFFAIRS JULY 2013

• India’s advanced meteorological satellite INSAT-3D was successfully launched by an European rocket from the spaceport of Kourou in French Guiana early today (i.e. on 26th July) giving a boost to weather forecasting and disaster warning services. European space consortium Arianespace’s Ariane 5 rocket launched INSAT-3D and Alphasat satellites. Alphasat is Europe’s largest telecommunication satellite-ever manufactured and results from a large-scale public-private partnership between the European Space Agency and Inmarsat.
  
• The workhorse vehicle lifted off exactly on schedule at 1.23 am IST from the Spaceport’s ELA-3 launch zone in French Guiana for a nearly 33-minute flight. This launch provided an excellent view of the flight’s initial trajectory, as the Ariane 5 began its vertical ascent, then rotated East, arching over the Spaceport’s main base area as it progressed downrange. The flight path was visible between scattered cloud layers and the clear meteorological conditions enabled an excellent view of the launch’s first phase, including separation of the two solid propellant boosters at an altitude of 67 km.
  
• Alphasat was deployed first in the flight sequence, nearly 28 minutes after the liftoff. Some five minutes later, Ariane 5 completed its mission with the successful separation of INSAT-3D, which carries a six-channel imager and 19-channel sounder, as well as a data relay transponder for satellite-aided search and rescue operations. “I am happy to inform you that the Master Control Facility at Hassan in India has already received signals from INSAT-3D”, Chairman of Indian Space Research Organisation K. Radhakrishnan said minutes after the launch.
  
• The imaging system of INSAT-3D has significant improvements over that of KALPANA and INSAT-3A, the space agency said. INSAT-3D will provide continuity to earlier missions and further augment the capability to provide various meteorological as well as search and rescue services. INSAT-3D had a lift-off mass of 2,060 kg.
  
• Biological E (BioE) and European biotech company Valneva SE said the World Health Organization (WHO) has pre-qualified its Japanese Encephalitis vaccine for global use in adults on 22nd July.The company expects that the pediatric indication will also be prequalified by the end of 2013.The WHO prequalification was a key step for distribution of the vaccine in developing countries. “We are happy that our JE vaccine is the first ever WHO prequalified vaccine. It is an extremely important achievement for the vaccines community as our vaccine’s prequalification is well in time to support GAVI’s plans of introducing the JE vaccine in several developing countries,” said Mahima Datla, MD, BioE. BioE and Valneva have joined hands in partnership in 2005 for the development and commercialization of a Japanese Encephalitis vaccine for endemic regions, based on Valneva’s JEV technology. The vaccine is being marketed in India under the trade-name JEEV and commercialization in other JE-endemic countries is planned.
  
• Scientists of the CSIR-Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (IICT) Hyderabad developed a software tool that can control and reduce the outbreak of Mosquito-borne diseases by data mining (Knowledge Discovering). This IT tool has been validated by the Central Government and taken up for implementation by health authorities in five States of States Gujarat, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Assam and Mizoram in the initial phase which will be extended to all other States in a phased manner. This technology has been developed by Dr. U.S.N. Murthy, Chief Scientist, Biology Division at the IICT and his team by improvising and customizing Self Organizing Map (SOM), a cluster technique in data mining.
  
• SOM technology would enable health officials to prioritize control parameters in endemic zones at village level and initiate measures to minimize morbidity and mortality, caused by the onset of vector-borne diseases. SOM technology can help to alert health authorities to take up larval and adult spraying before the transmission of parasite by the mosquito. Mosquito-borne diseases like malaria, Japanese encephalitis and dengue are posing a serious public health problem in India and other South-East Asian Countries, with some of them were occurring in an epidemic form on a periodical basis. The North East of India parts account for about 10.5 per cent of malaria cases and 20 per cent of the deaths. The technology works on two ways -one relating to the names of the villages and the second focusing on mosquito density, infection, infectivity and parasitic load. Based on these parameters, a complete mapping of the villages could be done in terms of prioritizing control parameters.
  
• US lawmakers are pushing a plan to establish a new national park that would quite literally be out of this world - on the Moon. A new bill introduced into the US Congress on 14 July, would create the Apollo Lunar Landing Sites National Historical Park on the Moon. Called the Apollo Lunar Landing Legacy Act, the bill (House Resolution 2617) was referred to the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, and in addition to the House Committee on Natural Resources. Emphasizing that the Apollo lunar programme was one of the greatest achievements in the US history, the bill notes that, as commercial enterprises and foreign nations acquire the ability to land on the Moon, "it is necessary to protect the Apollo lunar landing sites for posterity. "The bill, in part, calls for no later than one year after the date of enactment of the act, "there shall be established as a unit of the National Park System the Apollo Lunar Landing Sites National Historical Park."Establishing such a park will expand and enhance the protection and preservation of the Apollo lunar landing sites, the bill states, "and provide for greater recognition and public understanding of this singular achievement in American history."The bill also spotlights the artifacts on the surface of the Moon associated with the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, "which had an instrumentality crash land on the lunar surface April 14, 1970," it states.
  
• NASA, the U.S. space agency announced the discovery of Neptune’s 14th moon in July, 2013. The Hubble Space Telescope captured the moon as a white dot in photos of the planet on the periphery of our solar system. The new moon, Neptune’s tiniest at just 19.3 km across, and is designated as S/2004 N 1.
  
• The Neptune 14th moon was actually discovered by the SETI Institute’s Mark Showalter while studying the segments of rings around Neptune when he spotted the white dot popping out, 1,05,250 km from Neptune. He tracked its movement in more than 150 pictures taken from 2004 to 2009. The method involved tracking the movement of a white dot that appears over and over in more than 150 archival Neptune photographs taken by Hubble from 2004 to 2009. The considerably bigger gas giant Jupiter has four times as many moons, with 67.
  
• A healthy baby boy in the US has become the world's first test tube baby to be born using a new low cost "next-generation sequencing" IVF technique that screens the embryo for genetic defects, Oxford scientists announced on 8th July. The method, through which the baby was born last month, uses the latest DNA sequencing techniques and aims to increase in-vitro fertilization success rates while being more affordable for couples and lowering the risk of miscarriages, researchers say. The international team led by Dr Dagan Wells of Oxford University showed how "next-generation sequencing" can be used to pick the embryos created by IVF that are most likely to lead to successful pregnancies.
  
• NASA has turned off a decade-old space telescope, a year after loaning the orbiting instrument to a university that operated it with private funding. The space agency decommissioned its Galaxy Evolution Explorer spacecraft, or GALEX, on June 28, NASA officials said. During its 10-year career, GALEX peered at hundreds of millions of galaxies, helping researchers better understand how these huge collections of stars grow and evolve.
  
• "GALEX is a remarkable accomplishment," Jeff Hayes, NASA's GALEX program executive in Washington, D.C., said in a statement. "This small Explorer mission has mapped and studied galaxies in the ultraviolet, light we cannot see with our own eyes, across most of the sky."The $150 million GALEX satellite launched in April 2003 on a 29-month mission to study the history of star formation in the universe. NASA extended GALEX but eventually stopped funding it in February 2011.
  
• In May 2012, the agency made an unprecedented move, handing the spacecraft's reins over to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, which kept GALEX going with private funds. Some of the mission's highlights include helping astronomers identify the largest known spiral galaxy in the universe, a behemoth called NGC 6872; catching a black hole in the act of gobbling up a star; and discovering a missing link in galaxy evolution, a sort of "teenage stage" between young and old.
  
• ISRO’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, PSLV-C22, has successfully launched IRNSS-1A, the first satellite in the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS) from Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota on 1 July. This is the 23rd consecutively successful mission of PSLV. After a flight of 20 minutes 17 seconds, the IRNSS-1A Satellite, weighing 1425 kg, was injected to the intended elliptical orbit of 282.46 km X 20,625.37 km. ISRO’s Master Control Facility (at Hassan, Karnataka) assumed the control of the satellite. IRNSS-1A is the first of the seven satellites constituting the space segment of the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System. IRNSS is an independent regional navigation satellite system designed to provide position information in the Indian region and 1,500 km around the Indian mainland. IRNSS would provide two types of services, namely, Standard Positioning Services (SPS) – provided to all users – and Restricted Services (RS) provided only to authorised users. As per ISRO the entire IRNSS constellation of seven satellites is planned to completed by 2015-16.