Current Affairs Questions

Explanation :

• The United Arab Emirates Mars Mission called “Hope” was announced in 2015 with the aim of creating mankind’s first integrated model of the Red planet’s atmosphere.
• The mission is officially named the Emirates Mars Mission (EMM) and the orbiter has been named Hope or ‘Al Amal’.
• It is scheduled to take off from its launch site, Tanegashima Space Center, Japan.
• Hope weighs over 1500 kg, and will carry scientific instruments mounted on one side of the spacecraft, including the Emirates eXploration Imager (EXI), which is a high-resolution camera, the Emirates Mars Ultraviolet Spectrometer (EMUS), a far-UV imaging spectrograph, the Emirates Mars InfraRed Spectrometer (EMIRS), and FTIR scanning spectrometer.
• The spacecraft will orbit Mars to study the Martian atmosphere and its interaction with outer space and solar winds.
• Hope will collect data on Martian climate dynamics, which should help scientists understand why Mars’ atmosphere is decaying into space.

Explanation :

• Russia will launch its first Arktika-M satellite for monitoring the Arctic climate and environment at the end of the year.

Significance

• The Arktika-M is a remote-sensing and emergency communications satellite.
• It will help collect meteorological data from the polar regions of the Earth.
• The data will help improve weather forecasts and enable scientists to better study climate change.

Explanation :

• The Artemis (Acceleration, Reconnection, Turbulence and Electrodynamics of Moon’s Interaction with the Sun) program is an ongoing crewed spaceflight program carried out predominantly by NASA, with the goal of landing "the first woman and the next man" on the Moon, specifically at the lunar south pole region by 2024.
• Other partners in the mission include European Space Agency (ESA), the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and the Australian Space Agency (ASA).

Mission Objectives

• Find and use water and other critical resources needed for long-term exploration
• Investigate the Moon’s mysteries and learn more about our home planet and the universe
• Learn how to live and operate on the surface of another celestial body where astronauts are just three days from home
• Prove the technologies we need before sending astronauts on missions to Mars, which can take up to three years roundtrip

Key Details

• NASA sees Artemis as the next step towards the long-term goal of establishing a sustainable presence on the Moon, laying the foundation for private companies to build a lunar economy, and eventually sending humans to Mars
• NASA’s powerful new rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), will send astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft nearly a quarter million miles from Earth to lunar orbit.
• The agency will fly two missions around the Moon to test its deep space exploration systems. NASA is working toward launching Artemis I, an uncrewed flight to test the SLS and Orion spacecraft together, followed by the Artemis II mission, the first SLS and Orion test flight with crew.
• NASA will land astronauts on the Moon by 2024 on the Artemis III mission and about once a year thereafter.

Explanation :

• The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-on (GRACE-FO) mission is a partnership between NASA and the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ).
• Launched on 22 May 2018, GRACE-FO is a successor to the original GRACE mission, which began orbiting Earth on March 17, 2002
• The primary objective of the GRACE-FO Mission is to obtain precise global and high-resolution models for both the static and the time variable components of the Earth's gravity field.
• The GRACE missions measure variations in gravity over Earth's surface, producing a new map of the gravity field every 30 days.
• Thus, GRACE shows how the planet's gravity differs not only from one location to another, but also from one period of time to another.

Significance

• It will continue the work of tracking Earth's water movement to monitor changes in underground water storage, the amount of water in large lakes and rivers, soil moisture, ice sheets and glaciers, and sea level caused by the addition of water to the ocean.
• These discoveries provide a unique view of Earth's climate and have far-reaching benefits to society and the world's population.

Explanation :

India is not a part of the International Space Station programme.

Explanation :

On 21^st June, a joint German–Russian mission called the Spectrum-Roentgen-Gamma (SRG), which is a telescope, was launched into space to chart an unprecedented map. This will create a three-dimensional (3D) X-ray map of the universe and unveil unknown super massive black holes, dark energy and stars.