AWARDS
Gallantry Awards, 2012
Ashok Chakra: Lt Navdeep Singh, a third generation who died after killing four hardcore infiltrating terrorists and saved his colleague’s life in a fierce encounter in Jammu and Kashmir has been conferred the highest peace time gallantry award, posthumously.
Kirti Chaktra: The second highest peacetime gallantry award has been conferred on three Army officers, including Lt. Sushil Khajuria from Grenadiers regiment, posthumously.
The other two awardees are Lt. Col. Kamaldeep Singh of 18 Rashtriya Rifles battalion and Capt. Ashutosh Kumar from Rajputana Rifles.
All the three officers were involved in anti-militancy operations in J&K.
Republic Day Awards, 2012
A total of 109 persons, including 19 women, have been selected for the Padma awards. Five personalities have been given Padma Vibhushan, 27 Padma Bhushan and 77 Padma Shree awards.
PADMA VIBHUSHAN: K.G. Subramanyan (painting and sculpture), Late Mario De Miranda (cartoonist), Late (Dr) Bhupen Hazarika (vocal music), Dr Kantilal Hastimal Sancheti (orthopaedics), T.V. Rajeswar (civil service), Delhi.
PADMA BHUSHAN: Prominent among winners were Shabana Azmi (cinema), Khaled Choudhury (theatre), Jatin Das (painting), Pandit Buddhadev Das Gupta (sarod), Dharmendra (cinema), Mira Nair (cinema), M.S. Gopalakrishnan (violin), Dr Suresh H. Advani (oncology), Dr Noshir H. Wadia (medicine-neurology), N. Vittal (civil service), Ronen Sen (civil service).
PADMA SHRI: Among the winners were Vanraj Bhatia (music), Zia Fariduddin Dagar (music-vocal), Nameirakpam Ibemni Devi (music-khongjom parba), Joy Michael (theatre), Mohan Lal Kumhar (terracotta), Anup Jalota(Indian classical music-vocal), Soman Nair Priyadarsan (cinema-direction), Priya Paul (trade and industry), Surjit Singh Patar (poetry), Jhulan Goswami (women’s cricket), Zafar Iqbal (hockey), Limba Ram (archery), Ravi Chaturvedi (sports-commentary), Kartikeya V. Sarabhai (environmental education).
Golden Globe Awards, 69th
Best Actor in a Motion Picture (Drama): George Clooney, for his role in ‘The Descendants’ and Meryl Streep, for her performance as Margaret Thatcher in ‘The Iron Lady’.
Best Original Song (Motion Picture): Madonna’s ‘Masterpiece’ from her directorial venture “W.E.”
Best Director (Motion Picture): Veteran filmmaker Martin Scorsese, for his ‘Hugo’, while Woody Allen took home the
Best Screenplay: Woody Allen for ‘Midnight In Paris’.
Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical: Jean Dujardin, for his performance in ‘The Artist’, which was also named the Best Motion Picture (Comedy or Musical).
Best Animated Feature Film: ‘The Adventures Of Tintin’.
Best Foreign Language Film: Iranian picture ‘A Separation’ by Asghar Farhadi.
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DEFENCE
Indian Air Force to get Rafale fighter jets
The Indian government has accepted the bid of French firm Rafale for supply of 126 fighter jets at a cost of $20 billion. Under the MMRCA (medium multi-role combat aircraft) project, the first 18 jets will come in “fly-away condition” from mid-2015 onwards. The remaining fighters will be manufactured in India over six years after the transfer of technology to HAL.
The 126 new jets will add to the ongoing induction of 272 Sukhoi-30MKIs, contracted from Russia for around $12 billion to bolster India’s depleting number of fighter squadrons.
India gets N-powered submarine
On January 23, 2012, Russia formally handed over Nerpa, a nuclear-powered submarine, to India. The submarine that has the capacity to fire nuclear warheads has been rechristened INS Chakra.
The submarine is on a 10-year lease to India under $ 900 million contract.
The vessel has the capacity to carry four 533mm torpedoes and four 650mm torpedos. Though the Russians, under the Missile Technology Control Regime, cannot give any N-tipped missiles with the submarine, India has its own missiles which match the size of the torpedo tubes available on Nerpa. The DRDO has already mimicked an under-water launch of a missile that could be fitted onto the ingeniously produced INS Arihant.
After the US, Russia, France, Britain and China, India has become the sixth operator of nuclear submarines in the world.
Significantly for India, it will be almost after a gap of two decades that the Indian Navy will operate a nuclear-powered submarine. The country had earlier leased a submarine from Russia that was returned.
The can plunge into depths of 600 metres while its endurance to remain under water is 100 days. The under-water endurance of nuclear submarine is what makes it so potent. Diesel-electric powered submarines—which the Indian Navy uses—have to surface every 3-4 days to ‘breathe’.
PROJECTS
GPS-aided Gagan set to take-off
Flights over the country and the Indian Ocean, from East Africa to Australia, will soon be safer, more economical and environment friendly with the Airports Authority of India (AAI) moving a step closer to installing a GPS-aided geo-augmented navigation system (GAGAN) for commercial aircraft.
Once the system is operational, by late 2013 or early 2014, it will plug a hole in the global satellite-based aircraft navigation umbrella over a vast expanse through which aircraft had to fly with navigational coordinates and no real time geo-positioning.
The Rs 800 crore project, taken up by AAI, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and Raytheon, will take India into an exclusive club whose members possess the advanced system.
Fifteen reference and ground stations, including one at Port Blair, have been established and networked using high performance communication circuits. Signals from the satellite are being used to test for availability of standbys and other features of the network.
Standby testing, or redundancy testing in aviation parlance, is crucial because at least three ground locations will be required to position an aircraft and at least two ground locations will be used to route an aircraft when it is in Indian airspace.
Gagan’s geo-satellites will use the C-band, normally used for long-distance telecommunication, and the L-band, also used by EU’s Galileo satellite navigation system.
Gagan will help aircraft take the shortest possible routes, saving fuel and time. Aircraft will not need to depend on ground-based navigational aids like VOR (VHF omni directional range) or NDB (non-directional beacon). Air routes are currently based on the availability of ground-based navigational units.
SPACE RESEARCH
Strongest solar storm in seven years bombards earth
On January 24, 2012, the Sun bombarded earth with radiations from the biggest solar storm since 2005, which headed towards our planet at 93 million miles per hour.
The main issue is radiation, which is mostly a concern for satellite disruptions and astronauts in space. It can also cause communication problems for polar-travelling aeroplanes.
World’s largest solar telescope to be set in Ladakh
Jammu and Kashmir will have the distinction of setting up the world’s largest solar telescope in the Ladakh region of the State. The National Large Solar Telescope (NLST) is being set up by the Department of Science and Technology, government of India, at the Pangong Tso Lake in Ladakh.
Fitted with a 2m reflector, the telescope will allow scientists to carry out cutting-edge research to understand the fundamental processes taking place on the sun. It will help the scientific community to study the long term changes in the earth’s climate and environment and also provide useful data to carry out research, in order to minimise or remove disruptions to communications network and satellites due to periodic solar winds.
NASA probe Grail reaches Moon orbit
As planet Earth rang in the new year, a different kind of countdown was happening at the moon. After a 3½-month journey, a NASA spacecraft flew over the Moon’s south pole, fired its engine and dropped into orbit on January 1, 2012, in the first of two back-to-back arrivals over the New Year’s weekend.
The Grail probes—short for Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory—had been cruising independently toward their destination since launching in September 2011, on a mission to measure lunar gravity.
Grail is the 110th mission to target the moon since the dawn of the Space Age, including the six Apollo moon landings that put 12 astronauts on the surface.
Grail is expected to help researchers better understand why Moon is asymmetrical and how it formed, by mapping the uneven lunar gravity field that will indicate what’s below the surface. Previous missions have attempted to study gravity with mixed results. Grail is the first mission devoted to this goal.
Gallantry Awards, 2012
Ashok Chakra: Lt Navdeep Singh, a third generation who died after killing four hardcore infiltrating terrorists and saved his colleague’s life in a fierce encounter in Jammu and Kashmir has been conferred the highest peace time gallantry award, posthumously.
Kirti Chaktra: The second highest peacetime gallantry award has been conferred on three Army officers, including Lt. Sushil Khajuria from Grenadiers regiment, posthumously.
The other two awardees are Lt. Col. Kamaldeep Singh of 18 Rashtriya Rifles battalion and Capt. Ashutosh Kumar from Rajputana Rifles.
All the three officers were involved in anti-militancy operations in J&K.
Republic Day Awards, 2012
A total of 109 persons, including 19 women, have been selected for the Padma awards. Five personalities have been given Padma Vibhushan, 27 Padma Bhushan and 77 Padma Shree awards.
PADMA VIBHUSHAN: K.G. Subramanyan (painting and sculpture), Late Mario De Miranda (cartoonist), Late (Dr) Bhupen Hazarika (vocal music), Dr Kantilal Hastimal Sancheti (orthopaedics), T.V. Rajeswar (civil service), Delhi.
PADMA BHUSHAN: Prominent among winners were Shabana Azmi (cinema), Khaled Choudhury (theatre), Jatin Das (painting), Pandit Buddhadev Das Gupta (sarod), Dharmendra (cinema), Mira Nair (cinema), M.S. Gopalakrishnan (violin), Dr Suresh H. Advani (oncology), Dr Noshir H. Wadia (medicine-neurology), N. Vittal (civil service), Ronen Sen (civil service).
PADMA SHRI: Among the winners were Vanraj Bhatia (music), Zia Fariduddin Dagar (music-vocal), Nameirakpam Ibemni Devi (music-khongjom parba), Joy Michael (theatre), Mohan Lal Kumhar (terracotta), Anup Jalota(Indian classical music-vocal), Soman Nair Priyadarsan (cinema-direction), Priya Paul (trade and industry), Surjit Singh Patar (poetry), Jhulan Goswami (women’s cricket), Zafar Iqbal (hockey), Limba Ram (archery), Ravi Chaturvedi (sports-commentary), Kartikeya V. Sarabhai (environmental education).
Golden Globe Awards, 69th
Best Actor in a Motion Picture (Drama): George Clooney, for his role in ‘The Descendants’ and Meryl Streep, for her performance as Margaret Thatcher in ‘The Iron Lady’.
Best Original Song (Motion Picture): Madonna’s ‘Masterpiece’ from her directorial venture “W.E.”
Best Director (Motion Picture): Veteran filmmaker Martin Scorsese, for his ‘Hugo’, while Woody Allen took home the
Best Screenplay: Woody Allen for ‘Midnight In Paris’.
Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical: Jean Dujardin, for his performance in ‘The Artist’, which was also named the Best Motion Picture (Comedy or Musical).
Best Animated Feature Film: ‘The Adventures Of Tintin’.
Best Foreign Language Film: Iranian picture ‘A Separation’ by Asghar Farhadi.
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DEFENCE
Indian Air Force to get Rafale fighter jets
The Indian government has accepted the bid of French firm Rafale for supply of 126 fighter jets at a cost of $20 billion. Under the MMRCA (medium multi-role combat aircraft) project, the first 18 jets will come in “fly-away condition” from mid-2015 onwards. The remaining fighters will be manufactured in India over six years after the transfer of technology to HAL.
The 126 new jets will add to the ongoing induction of 272 Sukhoi-30MKIs, contracted from Russia for around $12 billion to bolster India’s depleting number of fighter squadrons.
India gets N-powered submarine
On January 23, 2012, Russia formally handed over Nerpa, a nuclear-powered submarine, to India. The submarine that has the capacity to fire nuclear warheads has been rechristened INS Chakra.
The submarine is on a 10-year lease to India under $ 900 million contract.
The vessel has the capacity to carry four 533mm torpedoes and four 650mm torpedos. Though the Russians, under the Missile Technology Control Regime, cannot give any N-tipped missiles with the submarine, India has its own missiles which match the size of the torpedo tubes available on Nerpa. The DRDO has already mimicked an under-water launch of a missile that could be fitted onto the ingeniously produced INS Arihant.
After the US, Russia, France, Britain and China, India has become the sixth operator of nuclear submarines in the world.
Significantly for India, it will be almost after a gap of two decades that the Indian Navy will operate a nuclear-powered submarine. The country had earlier leased a submarine from Russia that was returned.
The can plunge into depths of 600 metres while its endurance to remain under water is 100 days. The under-water endurance of nuclear submarine is what makes it so potent. Diesel-electric powered submarines—which the Indian Navy uses—have to surface every 3-4 days to ‘breathe’.
PROJECTS
GPS-aided Gagan set to take-off
Flights over the country and the Indian Ocean, from East Africa to Australia, will soon be safer, more economical and environment friendly with the Airports Authority of India (AAI) moving a step closer to installing a GPS-aided geo-augmented navigation system (GAGAN) for commercial aircraft.
Once the system is operational, by late 2013 or early 2014, it will plug a hole in the global satellite-based aircraft navigation umbrella over a vast expanse through which aircraft had to fly with navigational coordinates and no real time geo-positioning.
The Rs 800 crore project, taken up by AAI, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and Raytheon, will take India into an exclusive club whose members possess the advanced system.
Fifteen reference and ground stations, including one at Port Blair, have been established and networked using high performance communication circuits. Signals from the satellite are being used to test for availability of standbys and other features of the network.
Standby testing, or redundancy testing in aviation parlance, is crucial because at least three ground locations will be required to position an aircraft and at least two ground locations will be used to route an aircraft when it is in Indian airspace.
Gagan’s geo-satellites will use the C-band, normally used for long-distance telecommunication, and the L-band, also used by EU’s Galileo satellite navigation system.
Gagan will help aircraft take the shortest possible routes, saving fuel and time. Aircraft will not need to depend on ground-based navigational aids like VOR (VHF omni directional range) or NDB (non-directional beacon). Air routes are currently based on the availability of ground-based navigational units.
SPACE RESEARCH
Strongest solar storm in seven years bombards earth
On January 24, 2012, the Sun bombarded earth with radiations from the biggest solar storm since 2005, which headed towards our planet at 93 million miles per hour.
The main issue is radiation, which is mostly a concern for satellite disruptions and astronauts in space. It can also cause communication problems for polar-travelling aeroplanes.
World’s largest solar telescope to be set in Ladakh
Jammu and Kashmir will have the distinction of setting up the world’s largest solar telescope in the Ladakh region of the State. The National Large Solar Telescope (NLST) is being set up by the Department of Science and Technology, government of India, at the Pangong Tso Lake in Ladakh.
Fitted with a 2m reflector, the telescope will allow scientists to carry out cutting-edge research to understand the fundamental processes taking place on the sun. It will help the scientific community to study the long term changes in the earth’s climate and environment and also provide useful data to carry out research, in order to minimise or remove disruptions to communications network and satellites due to periodic solar winds.
NASA probe Grail reaches Moon orbit
As planet Earth rang in the new year, a different kind of countdown was happening at the moon. After a 3½-month journey, a NASA spacecraft flew over the Moon’s south pole, fired its engine and dropped into orbit on January 1, 2012, in the first of two back-to-back arrivals over the New Year’s weekend.
The Grail probes—short for Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory—had been cruising independently toward their destination since launching in September 2011, on a mission to measure lunar gravity.
Grail is the 110th mission to target the moon since the dawn of the Space Age, including the six Apollo moon landings that put 12 astronauts on the surface.
Grail is expected to help researchers better understand why Moon is asymmetrical and how it formed, by mapping the uneven lunar gravity field that will indicate what’s below the surface. Previous missions have attempted to study gravity with mixed results. Grail is the first mission devoted to this goal.
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