Science & Technology GK Questions with Answers – Page 12

In 1977 astronomers watched Uranus pass in front of a distant star from the observatory in the Javadi hills, and the dips in the star's light before and after the planet itself crossed showed that rings surround Uranus.

It is now part of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, and its digitised archive of daily photographs of the solar disc, sunspots and the chromosphere is among the longest continuous records of the Sun anywhere, which makes it valuable for the study of long solar cycles.

The Indian Astronomical Observatory sits there at about 4,500 metres in a cold desert, one of the highest and driest observing sites in the world, where very little water vapour and almost no artificial light make the sky exceptionally clear and dark.

The telescope was built in collaboration with Belgium and activated in 2016 on the Devasthal ridge at about 2,450 metres, and the same site carries a 1.3 metre fast optical telescope and the four metre liquid mirror telescope.

Fourteen of them stand close together in a central square of about one kilometre, and the remaining sixteen are spread along three arms in a Y shape stretching some twenty-five kilometres, which gives the array both the sensitivity of a filled aperture and the resolution of a wide one.

The array stands at Khodad, near Narayangaon, about eighty kilometres north of Pune, on flat land chosen for its low level of man-made radio interference, and it is operated by the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research.

Digital India was launched on that date with three stated aims: digital infrastructure as a utility for every citizen, governance and services on demand, and the digital empowerment of citizens; BharatNet, Common Service Centres, DigiLocker and the UMANG application all sit within it.

Phishing uses a message that looks as though it comes from a trusted institution, so that the reader voluntarily gives up credentials; the same fraud carried out by telephone call is called vishing and by text message smishing.

The Act of 2023 calls the individual to whom the personal data relates the Data Principal, and gives that person rights of access, correction, erasure and grievance redressal.

A denial of service attack exhausts a server's capacity with a flood of requests, and when the flood is generated from many machines at once, often a botnet of infected computers, it is called distributed.

The NPCI, set up in 2008 under the Payment and Settlement Systems Act of 2007 by the Reserve Bank and the Indian Banks' Association, launched UPI in 2016; it also runs RuPay, IMPS, the Aadhaar Enabled Payment System, NACH and FASTag.

The NCIIPC was designated under section 70A of the IT Act to protect critical information infrastructure, meaning computer resources whose incapacitation would have a debilitating effect on national security, the economy, public health or safety, and it works as a unit of the NTRO.

The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team functions under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and is designated by section 70B as the national agency for collecting and analysing information on cyber incidents, issuing advisories and coordinating responses.

In 2015 the Supreme Court held section 66A, which punished the sending of offensive messages through a communication service, to be unconstitutional because it was vague and overbroad and violated the freedom of speech under Article 19(1)(a).

These are the three goals of information security: only authorised persons should read the data, the data must not be altered without authority, and the system must work when it is needed.

It gives legal recognition to electronic records and digital signatures, creates the offences of computer-related crime, and was amended substantially in 2008 to add provisions on cyber terrorism, interception and data protection by body corporates.

The C-17 Globemaster III, made by Boeing, is the heaviest transport aircraft of the Indian Air Force and is used to move troops, vehicles and relief material over long distances, including to high-altitude airfields.

Project 15B produced the Visakhapatnam class of guided missile destroyers, built at Mazagon Dock Shipbuilders in Mumbai, which includes INS Visakhapatnam, INS Mormugao and INS Imphal.

INS Vikramaditya is a modified Kiev class ship of Soviet origin, formerly named Admiral Gorshkov, which was rebuilt in Russia and handed over to India, entering service as an aircraft carrier operating MiG-29K fighters.

It is the only command in which units of the Army, the Navy and the Air Force work under a single commander-in-chief, an arrangement adopted because the islands lie far from the mainland and guard the approaches to the Malacca Strait.