(Current Affairs) Science & Technology, Defence, Environment | September: 2016

    Science & Technology, Defense, Environment

• Cassini spacecraft has discovered steep-sided canyons on Titan (Free Available)
• The Wildlife Institute of India will now house the country’s first repository on tigers (Free Available)
• Climate change could bring back age old diseases (Only for Online Coaching Members)
• Bone marrow transplant to become lot easier (Only for Online Coaching Members)

Cassini spacecraft has discovered steep-sided canyons on Titan

• NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has discovered steep-sided canyons, hundreds of meters deep, on Saturn’s moon Titan that are flooded with liquid hydrocarbons.
• The finding represents the first direct evidence of the presence of liquid-filled channels on Titan, as well as the first observation of the deep canyons, NASA said.
• The observations show that the channels — in particular, a network of them named Vid Flumina — are narrow canyons, generally less than a kilometre wide, with slopes steeper than 40 degrees.
• This suggested that the channels might also be filled with liquid, but a direct detection had not been made until now.
• Cassini’s radar was used as an altimeter, sending pings of radio waves to the moon’s surface to measure the height of features there.
• Earthly examples of both of these types of canyon-carving processes are found along the Colorado River in Arizona.
• An example of uplift powering erosion is the Grand Canyon, where the terrain’s rising altitude caused the river to cut deeply downward into the landscape over the course of several million years.

The Wildlife Institute of India will now house the country’s first repository on tigers

• The Wildlife Institute of India (WII) here will now house the country’s first repository on tigers, under its new Tiger Cell.
• The Dehradun-based WII has about 23,000 images of tigers. “This has to be maintained and the Tiger Cell will do that,”.
• Project clearanceThe Tiger Cell could also help with the development-conservation debate.
• When a project needs environmental clearance, our spatial data can be used to overlay the project plan on our maps and check whether the project would interfere.

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