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Russia’s Luna-25 has crashed on the Moon’s surface, the country’s space agency said Sunday in a disappointing end to its first mission to the lunar surface 47 years after the last landing by the former Soviet Union.
This leaves India’s Chandrayaan-3 on course to become the first spacecraft to land near the lunar south pole.
The Chandrayaan-3 Lander Module moved into its pre-landing orbit of 25 km x 134 km from the lunar surface, in preparation for its scheduled landing Wednesday.
It is from this orbit that the spacecraft will begin its descent around 1745 IST Wednesday. Touchdown is expected after 15 minutes.
The Indian Space Research Organisation said Chandrayaan-3 was functioning normally and getting ready for its scheduled descent Wednesday, at the beginning of the lunar day-time that extends to about 14 days on Earth.
The module would undergo internal checks and await the sunrise at the designated landing site (on the moon). The powered descent is expected to commence on August 23, 2023, around 1745 hours IST.
Editorial
The hunger challenge (Page no. 10)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
On the country’s 77th Independence Day, from the ramparts of the historic Red Fort in Delhi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that in the last five years, from 2015-16 to 2019-21, his government lifted 135 million people out of poverty.
This is a commendable achievement based on the Multi-dimensional Poverty Index (MDPI) prepared by the NITI Aayog. The UNDP had earlier estimated that India lifted 415 million people out of poverty (MDPI) over the period 2005-06 to 2019-21. I think this has been the biggest lift-off so far in independent India’s history.
After political freedom, the first and foremost job of an elected government is to reduce poverty, hunger and malnutrition. When India got freedom more than 80 per cent of people were in extreme poverty, which today hovers around 15 per cent as per MDPI and about 11 per cent based on income criterion ($2.15 PPP).
This gives us self-confidence and almost all governments of the day have contributed to varying degrees. But the pace of reduction has been much faster since 2005-06 than at any time in the past. A lot depends on the policies adopted by the government of the day.
The year 1991 was a watershed moment in India’s economic history when India started shifting from a state-controlled to a market-oriented economy. It started paying rich dividends after a few years of transitional adjustments.
The biggest achievement that I see today is in foreign exchange reserves that hover around $600 billion, up from a meagre $ 1.4 billion in July 1991.
This did not figure in the PM’s Independence Day speech, but it is this that has made the Indian economy much more resilient to any external shocks than perhaps any other achievement.
In the absence of this, India could have been in a similar crisis as some of our neighbours like Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
World
Luna-25 crash shows Russia’s fall from Soviet era heights in space exploration (Page no. 12)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Technology)
Russia’s first moon mission in 47 years has failed after its Luna-25 spacecraft spun out of control and crashed into the moon, dealing a significant setback to the embattled Russian space programme’s attempt to revive its Soviet-era prestige.
The state space corporation Roscosmos said it had lost contact with the craft at 1157 GMT on Saturday after a problem as the craft was shunted into pre-landing orbit. A soft landing had been planned for Monday.
The apparatus moved into an unpredictable orbit and ceased to exist as a result of a collision with the surface of the moon. It said a special interdepartmental commission had been formed to investigate the reasons behind the loss of the Luna-25 craft.
Pavel Luzin, an expert on the Russian space programme, said before the mission that Russia needed Luna-25 “to demonstrate that it is capable to do something even without the west”.
The failure underscored the decline of Russia’s space power since the glory days of cold war competition when Moscow was the first to launch a satellite to orbit the Earth – Sputnik 1, in 1957 – and the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to travel into space in 1961.
The Luna-25 mission sought to land near the south pole of the moon, collecting geological samples from the area, and sending back data for signs of water or its building blocks, which could raise the possibility of a future human colony on the moon.
Explained
What the luna 25 crash tells us about moon landings (Page no. 14)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Technology)
Luna-25, modern Russia’s first attempt to land a spacecraft on the Moon, has ended in failure with the spacecraft crashing onto the lunar surface, Russian space agency Roscosmos. The failure once again highlights the risks involved in getting a spacecraft to soft-land on the Moon.
Even though a successful landing has been achieved more than 20 times, including six times with human beings on board, the technology clearly has not been mastered yet.
Amazingly, except the three Chinese landings in the past 10 years, all the successful landings on the Moon happened within a decade between 1966 and 1976.
Ahead of the Chandrayaan-2 mission in 2019, the then chairman of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), K Sivan, had referred to the final phase of landing as “15 minutes of terror”.
That remark captures the essence of the complexity involved in making a descent from the lunar orbit to the Moon’s surface. Quite clearly, this is the most difficult part of the Moon mission.
In the past four years, government and private space agencies from four countries — India, Israel, Japan and now Russia — have tried to land their spacecraft on the Moon, and failed.
Each of these missions encountered problems in the very last stage — during the landing process — and crashed on the Moon’s surface.
GE mustard: Less pungent, more useful (Page no. 14)
(GS Paper 3, Science and Technology)
Oilseeds yield not only oil for cooking and frying. Their so-called meal – the residual cake after extraction of oil from the seeds – is a protein-rich ingredient used in livestock, poultry and aqua feed.
India’s most significant domestically-grown oilseed is rapeseed-mustard. Its share in the country’s production of vegetable oils has been estimated at 42.6% (more than soyabean’s 19.2%) and in that of meal at 30.3% (next to soyabean’s 38.9%), as per the US Department of Agriculture’s data for the marketing year ending September 2023.
Mustard seeds have high levels of glucosinolates, a group of sulphur and nitrogen-containing compounds contributing to the characteristic pungency of their oil and meal. While that limits the oil’s acceptability among consumers – especially those preferring cooking medium having less strong flavour and odour – the problem is even more with the meal.
Rapeseed meal is unpalatable to poultry and pigs, while having to be mixed with fodder grass and water for giving to cattle and buffaloes. Besides reducing their feed intake, high glucosinolates are also known to cause goiter (swelling of neck) and internal organ abnormalities in livestock.
A lot of effort in the past two decades – including by scientists at Delhi University’s Centre for Genetic Manipulation of Crop Plants (CGMCP) and the Indian Council of Agricultural Research – has gone into the breeding of rapeseed-mustard lines of so-called Canola quality.
Economy
India – ASEAN decision on review of FTA in goods expected today (Page no. 15)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
A decision on a long pending issue of initiating a review of the existing free trade agreement on goods between India and the 10-nation Asean bloc may be taken up during a meeting in Indonesia on Monday.
The issue will come up for discussion and decision during the India-Asean economic ministers meeting on Monday. The meeting is being held on the sidelines of the ongoing meeting of the Economic ministers of ASEAN.
India has asked for the review of the agreement with an aim to eliminate barriers and misuse of the ASEAN India Trade in Goods Agreement, which came into effect on January 1, 2010.
The agenda will come up for discussion and decision tomorrow during the India-Asean (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) economic ministers meeting.
Members of the Asean include Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.
National e-commerce policy in final stages, no new draft will be issued now: Official (Page no. 15)
(GS Paper 3, Economy)
The proposed national e-commerce policy being formulated by the commerce and industry ministry is in the final stages and no new draft policy will be issued now for seeking views of stakeholders.
The Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) on August 2 held a detailed discussion with representatives of e-commerce firms and a domestic traders’ body on the proposed policy.
In that meeting, a broad level of consensus emerged among the concerned stakeholders on the proposed policy.
That exercise is over now. We are just getting a final sign off,” the official, who did not wish to be named, said, adding there will be a presentation of the proposed policy at the top level of the government.
On data localisation, the official said that the e-commerce companies would have to follow the law of the land. Earlier the ministry had issued two draft national e-commerce policies.