UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

Its full name is the Convention on International Liability for Damage Caused by Space Objects, and it fixes responsibility on the state that launches or procures the launch of a space object.

A communication satellite nearing the end of its life keeps a small reserve of fuel to raise itself out of the crowded geostationary ring into a higher orbit where it cannot drift back into a working slot or collide with an active satellite.

In February 2009 the working American communication satellite Iridium 33 and the defunct Russian military communication satellite Kosmos 2251 struck each other over Siberia at a relative speed of several kilometres per second.

NETRA stands for Network for Space Objects Tracking and Analysis. It is ISRO's programme to build radar, optical telescope and control centre capability for space situational awareness, so that India can detect, track and catalogue objects in orbit and warn its own satellites about possible close approaches instead of depending…

In Mission Shakti an interceptor developed by the Defence Research and Development Organisation was launched from Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam Island off the Odisha coast and destroyed India's own Microsat-R satellite in low Earth orbit at a height of about 283 kilometres.

Kessler, then working with the American space agency, published the argument that once the population of objects in low Earth orbit crosses a certain density, collisions between them will generate fragments faster than the atmosphere can drag the old debris down.

Global Positioning System satellites orbit at about 20,200 kilometres, which lies in the medium Earth orbit band stretching from 2,000 kilometres up to the geostationary height of 35,786 kilometres.

The British science fiction writer and engineer set out in 1945 how three satellites placed in a circular equatorial orbit at about 36,000 kilometres could relay radio signals to almost the whole inhabited world.

Such an orbit is near-polar, typically 600 to 900 kilometres high with an inclination of about 98 degrees, which makes it retrograde.

A geostationary satellite must match the rotation of the Earth with respect to the distant stars, and that rotation takes one sidereal day.

Only at this height does a satellite in a circular equatorial orbit take exactly one sidereal day to complete a revolution, which is the condition for appearing stationary above one point on the Earth.

With a population of 3,80,581 spread over 8,249 square kilometres, the territory recorded a density of only 46 persons per square kilometre at the 2011 Census, by far the lowest among the union territories, because most of its land is forest and most of its islands are uninhabited.

The Mahatma Gandhi Marine National Park, set up near Wandoor on the south-western coast of South Andaman, protects a stretch of coral reefs, mangroves and small islands along with the turtles, molluscs and reef fish that live there.

The union territory has no High Court of its own and comes under the jurisdiction of the Calcutta High Court, which holds a circuit bench in the territorial capital so that litigants do not have to travel to the mainland for every hearing.

Ross Island, which had been the administrative headquarters of the British in these islands before an earthquake damaged it, was renamed after Netaji in 2018 to honour his visit and his claim of the islands as free Indian soil.

During the Japanese occupation of the islands in the Second World War, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose visited Port Blair and hoisted the tricolour there, claiming the islands as the first Indian territory freed from British rule.

The jail was built at Port Blair over those ten years in the shape of a wheel, with seven wings radiating from a central watchtower and a total of 693 cells.

The indigenous communities of this territory fall into two racial groups. The Great Andamanese, Onge, Jarawa and Sentinelese of the Andaman group are of Negrito descent and are among the oldest surviving human populations outside Africa.

The Government of India announced in September 2024 that the capital of the union territory would be renamed Sri Vijaya Puram, replacing a name that came from the colonial period.

Indira Point lies at the southern tip of Great Nicobar, the largest island of the Nicobar group, and marks the southernmost land point of the Republic of India, a little above six and three quarter degrees north.