Science and Technology News Questions and Answers

Answer: A

Captain Arjun screens passengers boarding a train.

'Captain Arjun' is an AI-enabled robot deployed by the Railway Protection Force at Pune railway station in 2025. It screens passengers at the station with face recognition and other tools and helps the RPF with security.

It is a railway security robot, not one used at airports, ports or bus stations.

The Railway Protection Force is responsible for the security of railway property and passengers, and has been adding technology such as CCTV and face recognition at major stations.

Answer: A

Ethiopia's first satellite was ETRSS-1.

The Ethiopian Remote Sensing Satellite-1 (ETRSS-1) was launched from China in December 2019. It was built with Chinese support to gather data for agriculture, weather forecasting and the monitoring of natural resources.

ETISAT-1, ETSARS-1 and ETHIOS-1 are not the name of the satellite; they are invented variations of it.

Answer: D

The programme is Dhruv.

The Pradhan Mantri Innovative Learning Programme, named DHRUV, was launched in October 2019 at ISRO's headquarters in Bengaluru by the Ministry of Human Resource Development. It identifies talented school students in science, mathematics and other fields and gives them mentoring by experts.

NISHTHA is a teacher-training programme, YUVIKA is ISRO's own summer programme for school students, and Shagun is an online portal for school education. None of them is this programme.

Answer: D

All three statements are correct, so the answer is A, B and C are correct.

NASA astronaut Christina Koch spent 328 days in space on the International Space Station during 2019-20, a record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman (A). She returned to Earth in February 2020 together with Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency and Alexander Skvortsov of Roscosmos (B). Experiments on the station during her mission included growing protein crystals that could help develop treatments for diseases such as Parkinson's (C).

Each partial option leaves out a true statement.

Answer: A

The spacecraft was Chang'e 4.

China's Chang'e 4 landed in the Von Karman crater on the far side of the Moon on 3 January 2019, the first spacecraft ever to soft-land there. It used a relay satellite, Queqiao, to communicate with Earth.

Chang'e 3 landed on the near side in 2013, and Chang'e 2 was an orbiter. 'Liang'e 01' is not a Chinese lunar mission.

Answer: C

The new gecko was spotted at Hampi.

In 2019 researchers including a team from Osmania University, Hyderabad, described a new species of gecko from the rocky granite hills around Hampi in Ballari district. The boulder landscape of Hampi, better known for the ruins of Vijayanagara, turned out to hold reptiles not recorded elsewhere.

Belagavi, Kadur and Shivamogga were not the location reported for this discovery.

Answer: D

All three statements are correct, so the answer is A, B and C.

In July 2017 a team of Indian astronomers announced a previously unknown supercluster of galaxies in the direction of the constellation Pisces, about 4 billion light-years away, and named it Saraswati (A). The team was led by astronomers from the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) and the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), both in Pune (B).

Saraswati is one of the largest known structures in the nearby universe, estimated to stretch over about 650 million light-years (C). Since all three statements hold, every option that leaves one out is incomplete.

Answer: C

The portal was developed by IIT Mumbai (IIT Bombay).

The Indian Culture portal, indianculture.gov.in, was launched by the Ministry of Culture as part of the National Virtual Library of India. It brings together digitised material such as rare books, archives, museum collections and e-books, and the data was collected, curated and the portal developed by a team at IIT Bombay.

IIT Kharagpur, IIT Kanpur and IIT Delhi were not the developers.

Answer: B

The satellite is CARTOSAT-1.

CARTOSAT-1, an earth observation satellite carrying two panchromatic cameras for stereo imaging at about 2.5 m resolution, was launched by PSLV-C6 from Sriharikota on 5 May 2005. It is used for cartography and terrain mapping.

HAMSAT, a small amateur radio satellite, was launched on the same rocket, which is the trap. INSAT-4A is a communication satellite launched in December 2005, and RESOURCESAT-1 was launched in October 2003.

Answer: D

EMISAT was launched on 1st April, 2019.

ISRO launched EMISAT, an electronic intelligence satellite for the DRDO, on PSLV-C45 from Sriharikota on 1 April 2019, together with 28 foreign customer satellites. The mission was the first in which a PSLV placed payloads in three different orbits.

The other dates are wrong; in particular, 27 March 2019 was Mission Shakti, India's anti-satellite test, which is a likely source of confusion with the late-March options.