The I-STEM portal was conceived and is supported by which office?
- A.NITI Aayog
- B.Department of Science & Technology
- C.Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser
- D.Council of Scientific and Industrial Research
Correct answer
Explanation
The correct answer is Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser. The PSA's Office conceived and supports I-STEM, and it was this office that convened the first State Governments Nodal Officers Meeting for the portal on 21 September 2026. The meeting was chaired by Dr (Mrs) Parvinder Maini, Scientific Secretary in the Office of the PSA.
The other options are plausible because they are all part of India's science administration. NITI Aayog is the government's policy think tank. The Department of Science & Technology funds research and runs many science programmes. CSIR is a network of national laboratories, and its own ANALYTICS portal for instruments is now being integrated with I-STEM through API links, which makes it a particularly tempting wrong answer. But the portal itself belongs to the Office of the PSA.
Read the full article: Office of PSA Holds First State Nodal Officers Meeting on I-STEM
Practice Questions
The I-STEM portal for sharing scientific research facilities was launched by the Prime Minister in which month and year?
- A.January 2018
- B.January 2020
- C.August 2021
- D.January 2023
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I-STEM, the Indian Science Technology and Engineering facilities Map, was conceived and supported by the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser and launched by the Prime Minister in January 2020.
Read the full explanation →According to the Office of the PSA, the I-STEM portal lists more than how many scientific instruments?
- A.11,000
- B.21,000
- C.31,000
- D.41,000
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The Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser says I-STEM now lists more than 31,000 scientific instruments across nearly 4,000 institutions, and has over 65,000 registered users.
Read the full explanation →Data from which space mission enabled the discovery that UBC 63 is a double cluster system?
- A.Hubble Space Telescope of NASA
- B.Gaia mission of the European Space Agency
- C.AstroSat of ISRO
- D.James Webb Space Telescope
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The researchers used Gaia measurements, which give exceptionally precise positions and motions for stars right across the Milky Way, and it was these data that revealed two populations of starkly different ages inside what had been taken for one cluster.
Read the full explanation →What are the approximate ages of UBC 63A and UBC 63B?
- A.21 million years and 562 million years
- B.562 million years and 21 million years
- C.100 million years and 400 million years
- D.6 million years and 26 million years
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UBC 63A is the young cluster of the pair at roughly twenty-one million years, while UBC 63B is much older at about five hundred sixty-two million years.
Read the full explanation →What did a team led by Indian astronomers find about the galactic open cluster UBC 63?
- A.It is the nearest open cluster to the Sun
- B.It is actually two distinct clusters that passed close to each other
- C.It hosts the first planet found outside the Milky Way
- D.It is merging with the Andromeda galaxy
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The group, which lies about 4892 light years away and had been treated in the limited earlier literature as a single cluster, was found to hold two separate stellar populations, now named UBC 63A and UBC 63B. Their brightness and colours formed two sequences in the colour magnitude diagram, and…
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