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Science & Tech.
Mahesh

01/01/24 16:14 PM IST

Achievements in science & Technology

In News
  • While the Moon landing was quite clearly the crowning glory for Indian science in 2023, the year also marked a definite shift in gears for India’s space programme.
ISRO missions
  • This was one of the most productive years for ISRO, which carried out seven successful missions, including the two high-profile ones — Chandrayaan-3 and Aditya-L1, India’s first mission to the Sun.
  • The year ended the relatively lean streak for the space agency in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic, which seemed to have badly disrupted its schedule, affecting even the human spaceflight mission, Gaganyaan, originally planned for 2022.
  • With several preparatory tests still remaining, Gaganyaan is now scheduled for 2025.
  • ISRO unveiled an impressive list of milestones it aims to achieve in the next few years — sending an astronaut to the International Space Station in a joint effort with NASA in 2024;
  • Chandrayaan-4, a sample return mission from the Moon, in the next four years; space station Bhartiya Antariksh Station by 2028; and landing a human being on the Moon by 2040.
Chandrayaan-3
  • Several of these plans were firmed up only after the successful moon landing of Chandrayaan-3 in August.
  • The fact that the United States and the then Soviet Union had made Moon landings a fairly routine event in the 1960s and 1970s does in no way diminish the enormity of India’s feat.
  • Five decades later, there are still only two more countries to have gone to the Moon — China and India.
  • Chandrayaan-3 was sweeter because India’s first attempt, Chandrayaan-2 in 2019, had met with heartbreak in the last few seconds of its descent on the Moon’s surface.
  • This time, ISRO managed a perfect landing.
  • Another demonstration of the new close partnership was the agreement between ISRO and NASA to send a joint mission to the International Space Station, the permanent laboratory in space about 400 km above the earth’s surface, in 2024.
  • This would mean that India’s astronauts would get into space much earlier than the Gaganyaan mission of 2025.
  • Later in the year, India and the US also set up a working group for commercial space collaboration, which is expected to boost the private space industry in the country.
  • The two countries announced their intention to work together on planetary defence too.
National Research Foundation
  • While ISRO was breaking new grounds in space exploration, the government made an important intervention to expand the scale and quality of scientific research in the country.
  • Delivering on a promise it made five years ago, the government approved the National Research Foundation (NRF), to fund, promote and mentor research activities.
  • Modelled on the National Science Foundation in the United States, the NRF would ensure research funding of Rs 50,000 crore over the next five years. However, the biggest promise of NRF is in its mandate to develop research capacities in universities and colleges.
  • One of the objectives of NRF would be to build research capacities in our universities.
  • The NRF would promote research not just in the natural sciences and engineering, but also in social sciences, arts and humanities, with one of the primary aims being finding solutions to the big problems facing Indian society.
New initiatives
  • The year saw India taking important decisions towards developing indigenous capabilities in frontier areas of scientific research.
  • In April, it launched a Rs 6,000-crore National Quantum Mission, aimed at building a 1,000-qubit quantum computer over the next eight years.
  • Quantum computers are not just superfast, they utilise the quantum mechanical properties of matter at a tiny scale, allowing them to perform tasks that would be impossible, or impractical, for conventional computers.
  • The launch of the National Quantum Mission allows India to join a global technology development race when it is still in its nascent stages.
  • India has often been a late entrant in such matters, like in the development of supercomputers, and then has a lot of catching up to do. It also misses out on the spin-off benefits of technology development.
  • Another similar decision was the approval of the LIGO-India project to build a gravitational wave observatory in Maharashtra.
  • The project had received an in-principle approval seven years earlier, but it was only in April that the final nod came.
  • LIGO-India would be the third arm of two similar observatories in the United States which made the first discovery of gravitational waves in 2015, a feat that won the Nobel Prize in Physics two years later.
  • Towards the end of the year, India announced its decision to set up a new research station in Antarctica, to replace the ageing Maitri station.
  • The new station, Maitri-II, located just a few kilometers away from the existing one, which has been operational since 1989.
  • India has another operational station in Antarctica, called Bharati.
  • These stations are centres of India’s growing research footprint in Antarctica, which offers pristine environments for carrying out studies in a variety of scientific fields.
Upcoming missions
  • There are a series of high-profile launches scheduled in 2024, starting with the New Year’s day itself. The XPoSat, or the X-Ray Polarimeter Satellite, slated for launch on January 1, is the world’s second-of-its-kind mission, meant for studying the universe using X-ray polarimetry measurements.
  • NASA had sent a similar satellite, Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer, or IXPE, in 2021.
  • This would be India’s second consecutive astronomy mission after Aditya-L1.
  • These two satellites will observe the universe instead of the Earth, which most satellites do.
  • The much-awaited NASA-ISRO Satellite Aperture Radar (NISAR) is scheduled for the first quarter of next year.
  • Later, a test flight of Gaganyaan, without the astronauts, is scheduled.
Spending by India
  • India spends just 0.65% of its GDP on scientific research, far below the global average of 1.79% .
  • Women comprise only 18% of total scientific researchers in India, while globally this number is 33%.
  • The number of researchers per million population in India, 262, is significantly lower than even developing countries like Brazil (888), South Africa (484) or Mexico (349).
  • The performance of the NRF would be judged on its ability to improve these indicators.
Source- Indian Express

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