Category: Tech

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) are gearing up to launch the NISAR satellite in the first quarter of 2024.

The announcement comes after a high-profile meeting between a NASA delegation, led by administrator Bill Nelson, and India’s Minister of State for Science and Technology, Jitendra Singh.

NISAR is a low earth orbit observatory being jointly developed by NASA and ISRO to map the entire globe in 12 days and provide data for understanding changes in Earth and its climate. The satellite is expected to be worth nearly $1 billion.

During the meeting, Administrator Bill Nelson expressed NASA’s openness to supporting India in building its own space station, thereby deepening the collaboration between the two space agencies. The United States and India are actively working on plans to send an Indian astronaut to the International Space Station by the close of 2024.

“We expect by that time to have a commercial space station. I think India wants to have a commercial space station by 2040. If India wants us to collaborate with them, of course, we will be available. But that’s up to India,” Nelson said.

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is planning a mission to collect soil or rock samples from the Moon and bring these to Earth.

The proposed Lunar Sample Return Mission (LSRM) will hopefully be accomplished in the next five to seven years, said Nilesh Desai, Director, Space Application Centre (SAC), ISRO in a statement.

Under the project, which has an expected launch date in 2028, soil or rock samples will be collected from the Shiv Shakti point on the lunar surface. Two separate launch vehicles will be used to carry out the mission, as the exercise involves four modules: Transfer, Lander, Ascender, and Re-entry.

ISRO will use the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) Mark-II for the Transfer and Re-entry modules, while GSLV Mark-III be used for the Ascender and Lander modules.

The project, like Chandrayaan 3, is planned for one lunar day (14 days on Earth).

The LSRM follows the same lines as NASA’s collection of the first-ever samples from Bennu, the near-Earth asteroid. The US space agency achieved the feat in September with its OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, which returned to Earth’s atmosphere after completing a seven-year journey.

Amazon has initiated a worldwide last-mile fleet program in India, exclusively employing electric vehicles (EVs) for deliveries in its pursuit of achieving net-zero emissions. The program provides assistance and customised vehicles to its Delivery Service Partners (DSPs), promoting carbon-neutral deliveries in the Indian subcontinent.

The company has revealed its latest fleet of Mahindra Zor Grand three-wheeler EVs. These vehicles come equipped with digital rear-view cameras for enhanced safety, have a maximum speed of 50 kmph, and can cover over 100 km on a single charge. Additionally, the vehicles are integrated with telematics and safety technology, allowing real-time monitoring of vehicle performance and driving behaviour.

This initiative not only facilitates the leasing of the EV fleet, but also offers support to DSPs for maintenance, charging, and parking of these vehicles.

Amazon has set an ambitious goal to expand its electric fleet to 10,000 vehicles by 2025 in India, with a commitment to achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. The company has already deployed more than 6,000 electric vehicles across more than 400 cities in India.

As part of its sustainability efforts, Amazon has pledged $10 million to the C40 Cities’ initiative, Laneshift, in collaboration with The Climate Pledge and Global Optimism.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge have developed a floating, solar-powered device that can turn contaminated water or seawater into clean hydrogen fuel and purified water, anywhere in the world. The device could be useful in resource-limited or off-grid environments, as it works with any open water source and does not require any outside power.

The machine is inspired by photosynthesis, the natural process by which plants convert sunlight into food. However, unlike previous versions of the ‘artificial leaf’, which could produce green hydrogen fuel from clean water sources, the new device operates from polluted or seawater sources, while producing clean drinking water at the same time.

Tests of the device showed it was able to produce clean water from highly polluted water, seawater, and even from the River Cam in central Cambridge.

In addition, the new device uses more of the Sun’s energy. The researchers used a white, UV-absorbing layer on top of the floating device for hydrogen production via water splitting. The rest of the light in the solar spectrum is transmitted to the bottom of the device, which evaporates the water, making better use of the light.

The results of the study have been published in the journal Nature Water.

Google has unveiled GraphCast, a powerful new artificial intelligence (AI) that can make weather forecasts more accurately than existing best tools. In only one minute, the technology on a single machine made accurate predictions up to 10 days in advance, a task that usually takes many supercomputers hours to achieve.

In tests, GraphCast running on a single Google TPU v4 machine was compared to the current gold-standard for weather prediction – High Resolution Forecast (HRES), a simulation system running on supercomputers. It was able to make 10-day forecasts in under a minute, and was more accurate than HRES on 90% of the test variables and forecast lead times. When the models were focused on the troposphere – the lowest layer of the atmosphere, where accurate predictions are most useful and applicable to life – GraphCast outperformed HRES 99.7% of the time.

The new AI was trained on 40 years’ worth of weather reanalysis data, gathered by satellite images, radar and weather stations. GraphCast takes the state of the weather six hours ago and the current state, and uses its data to predict the weather state six hours from now. From this, it can project forward in six-hour increments to build a forecast up to 10 days ahead.

The research was published in the journal Science.

Laurie Leshin, Director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), has lauded the collaboration with Indian space agency, ISRO, calling it the most significant technological partnership between the US and India in space exploration history.

Set for liftoff in the first quarter of 2024, the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) will utilise the world’s most expensive Earth imaging satellite to study climate change.

NISAR marks the first collaboration between NASA and ISRO on hardware development for an Earth-observing mission. It aims to shed light on how changes in the ecosystems of forests and wetlands influence the global carbon cycle and climate change.

The JPL, managed by Caltech in Pasadena, spearheads the US segment, which is contributing the L-band SAR, radar reflector antenna, deployable boom, communication subsystem, GPS receivers, solid-state recorder, and payload data subsystem to NISAR.

The U.R. Rao Satellite Centre in Bengaluru takes the lead for the ISRO component, which has provided the spacecraft bus, S-band SAR electronics, launch vehicle, launch services, and satellite mission operations.

NISAR’s comprehensive monitoring will occur approximately every 12 days and go beyond studying just climate change. It will encompass the dynamics of forests, wetlands, and agricultural lands, enhancing scientific understanding across various observables.

InterGlobe Enterprises and US-based Archer Aviation will launch an all-electric air taxi service in India in 2026 that will be cost-competitive with on-road services, the companies said on November 9.

The partnership, once the companies get regulatory clearances, aims to capitalise on a growing need for transport solutions in India. The world’s most populous country is battling severe ground travel congestion and pollution in its main cities.

Backed by companies like Chrysler-parent Stellantis, Boeing and United Airlines, Archer Aviation makes electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft that have been touted as the future of urban air mobility. These ‘Midnight’ e-aircraft can carry four passengers and a pilot for up to 100 miles (about 161 kilometers).

The service aims to start with 200 aircraft from Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru. A trip that typically takes 60 to 90 minutes by car in Delhi, for example, will take about 7 minutes in an air taxi.

InterGlobe Enterprises also plans to use the e-aircraft for cargo, logistics, medical, emergency and charter services.

Archer Aviation secured a $142 million-deal from the US Air Force in July to provide six Midnight aircraft. The company in October said that it would launch an air taxi service in the UAE.

The first full-colour science images from the European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope have presented crystal-clear views of hundreds of thousands of galaxies, star clusters and other astonishing cosmic objects.

There are more than 100,000 galaxies in the telescope’s first snapshot of the Perseus cluster, including extremely faint ones that were never seen before.

The images are just a snapshot of what researchers expect the space telescope to provide over its planned six-year primary mission.

Launched in July, Euclid is stationed 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. It has a state-of-the-art 600-megapixel visible-light camera and a wide-field near-infrared spectrometer and photometer. Its first images – with extraordinary sharpness and breadth – focus on what is visible: spiral galaxies, elliptical swirls of stars and dandelion-puff-like clusters of stars pulled together by gravity.

The European Space Agency project is designed to study the universe’s large-scale structure to help solve the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy.

Dark matter is a substance that is all but invisible, save for its gravitational pull, while dark energy is a mysterious force that powers the accelerating expansion of the universe. Both subtly influence the shapes and arrangements of galaxies and galaxy clusters, which together form filaments, sheets and voids in a vast cosmic web.

The X-ray spectrometer, HEL1OS, onboard ISRO’s Aditya-L1 spacecraft on its maiden solar mission, has captured the first high-energy X-ray glimpse of solar flares, said the space agency on November 7.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) have provided continuous imagery and data on space weather conditions and solar activity since the 1970s.

According to ISRO, the HEL1OS instrument is currently undergoing fine-tuning of thresholds and calibration operations. It is set to monitor the Sun’s high-energy X-ray activity with fast timing and high-resolution spectra. The HEL1OS data enables researchers to study explosive energy release and electron acceleration during impulsive phases of solar flares.

A solar flare is a sudden brightening of the solar atmosphere. These flares are intense bursts of radiation coming from the release of magnetic energy associated with sunspots. Flares produce enhanced emission in all wavelengths across the electromagnetic spectrum – radio, optical, UV, soft X-rays, hard X-rays and gamma-rays. According to US space agency Nasa, these flares can last anywhere between minutes to hours.

HEL1OS was commissioned on October 27, 2023 and it has been monitoring the Sun for hard X-ray activities ever since.

The Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore (CAAS) and its regional counterparts have begun collaboration on a framework for safety rules and standards to regulate air taxi and drone operations. The authorities of the region met on November 9 to develop a set of regulatory reference materials by 2025 that each country can adapt and adopt to govern the emerging sectors.

The inaugural meeting, organised by CAAS, was attended by representatives from 17 civil aviation authorities in the Asia-Pacific region, including delegates from China and Japan, 24 private-sector institutes, and companies such as Skyports Infrastructure and Vertical Aerospace.

The civil aviation authorities agreed that the two priority areas for drones are technical guidance and personnel training.

For air taxis, the authorities agreed on six priority areas, including certification, collaboration between a country’s national agencies, and public education to promote this new form of air transport.

Collaboration among the regulators will allow CAAS to understand how risks are mitigated for air taxi operations, and to apply this information to regulatory requirements for Singapore.