science & tech

Question 1

Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer or IXPE

Answer 1

Joint effort of NASA and Italian Space Agency.
Dedicated to measuring the polarization of X-rays from the most extreme and mysterious objects in the universe – supernova remnants, supermassive black holes, and dozens of other high-energy objects.
By measuring the polarization of these X-rays, we can study where the light came from and understand
the geometry and inner workings of the light source

Question 2

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe

Answer 2

• It is a NASA space probe launched in 2018 with the mission of making observations of the outer corona of
the Sun.
• Parker Solar Probe is making discoveries that others spacecraft couldn’t, because they were too far away.
• It is set to fly into the sun’s corona within 3.8 million miles from the solar surface, seven times closer than
any other spacecraft.
• Parker Solar Probe will revolutionize our knowledge of the origin and evolution of the solar wind.

Question 3

Alfvén’s Critical Surface

Answer 3

Parker Solar Probe has officially touched the sun. This point is known as the Alfvén critical surface. This
point basically marks the end of the solar atmosphere & beginning of solar wind
• Unlike Earth, the Sun doesn’t have a solid surface. But it does have a superheated atmosphere, made of
solar material bound to the Sun by gravity and magnetic forces. However, as rising heat and pressure push that material away from the Sun, it reaches a point where gravity and magnetic fields are too weak to
contain it

Question 4

Xenobots

Answer 4

Xenobots has become world’s first living robots which can reproduce.
Xenobots are made up of a collection of frog egg cells instead of metals or plastics that can function as one
tiny unit.
• The reason scientists classify them as robots is that they are designed and engineered to behave in very
specific ways.
• They are engineered inside of a petri dish and can be programmed to move.
• The xenobot, which is a millimeter wide, has been described as a “reconfigurable creature”.

Question 5

SWADESH

Answer 5

DBT-National Brain Research Centre (DBT-NBRC) has recently developed the project SWADESH.
SWADESH is the first large-scale multimodal neuroimaging database designed specifically for the Indian population under one platform

Question 6

Kamo`oalewa

Answer 6

In 2006, the PanSTARRS telescope in Hawaii spotted a near-Earth object that orbits the Sun and yet remains
close to the Earth and scientists named it Kamo’oalewa.

Question 7

Norovirus

Answer 7

It is an animal-borne disease. It causes gastrointestinal illness including inflammation of the lining of the stomach and intestines, severe vomiting and diarrhoea.
• Transmission ➔ Norovirus is easily transmitted through close contact with people who have been infected, or by touching contaminated surfaces.
o It can also be spread by eating food that has been prepared or handled by someone with a stomach bug.
• Symptoms ➔ Diarrhoea, abdominal pain, vomiting, nausea, a high temperature, headache and body aches.

Question 8

NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART)

Answer 8

DART is a spacecraft which is allowed to crash into an asteroid and change its course.

Question 9

White Dwarf

Answer 9

White dwarfs are stars that have burned up all of the hydrogen they once used as nuclear fuel.
o Such stars have very high density.
o A typical white dwarf is half the size of our Sun and has a surface gravity 100,000 times that of Earth.
A white dwarf cools until it becomes a black dwarf, which emits no energy.

Question 10

SATYAM(Science and Technology of Yoga and Meditation)

Answer 10

Aims: To foster scientific research on the effects of yoga and meditation on physical & mental health and on cognitive functioning in healthy people as well as in patients with disorders.

Question 11

PASIPHAE Project (Polar-Areas Stellar-Imaging in Polarisation High-Accuracy Experiment)

Answer 11

• It is an international collaborative sky surveying project.
• Aim ➔ To study the polarisation in the light coming from millions of stars.
• Key features ➔
o The survey will use two high-tech optical polarimeters to observe the northern and southern skies, simultaneously.
This will help us focus on capturing starlight polarisation of very faint stars that are so far away that polarisation signals from there have not been systematically studied. The distances to these stars will be obtained from measurements of the GAIA satellite.
o By combining these data, astronomers will perform a maiden magnetic field tomography mapping of the interstellar medium of very large areas of the sky using a polarimeter instrument known as WALOP (Wide Area Linear Optical Polarimeter).