Today's Headlines

Chinese dual use facilities and its concerns

GS Paper -2 (International Relations)

The construction of a military facility on Coco Islands in Myanmar and a proposed remote satellite receiving ground station system in Sri Lanka, both coming up with Chinese help, have raised concerns in India of possible surveillance across the region.

More about the news:

• The military facility on Coco Islands, located very close to India’s Andaman and Nicobar island chain. It is about 60km from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
• China has proposed setting up a remote satellite receiving ground station system through a collaborative effort between the Aerospace Information Research Institute under the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of Ruhuna in southern Sri Lanka.
• Given its critical location, it can be used to spy on Indian assets and intercept sensitive information and also across the region.

Hangars and causeway

• London-based think tank published a report based on the satellite imagery using Maxar Technologies, which showed large-scale construction activity on the strategic archipelago.
• In the past, there have been reports that China had set up a signals intelligence facility operational since the 1990s.
• Noting that satellite tracking facilities are inherently dual-use in nature, sources said that the Chinese civil space programme is known to work closely with the Chinese military.
• China’s expanding ground stations in the region could potentially be used to intercept sensitive information about Indian assets.
• The source said that India’s satellite launch facilities in Sriharikota and the integrated missile test range in Odisha could come under the scanner of the ground station, and launches from there could be tracked to obtain sensitive data.
• For example, space tracking and surveillance ships can perform many of the same functions as ground stations, with the added benefit of mobility.
• In August 2022, the docking of Chinese spy ship ‘Yuan Wang-5’ at Hambantota created a major diplomatic showdown between India and Sri Lanka.
• Later in November, another vessel ‘Yuan Wang-6’ had entered the Indian Ocean Region, coinciding with a planned Indian long-range missile launch but the launch was deferred and the vessel had re-entered the IOR in December when the missile test was rescheduled.

China activities elsewhere:

• China is also expanding its network of ground stations in South America and, in February, announced setting up one such station in Antarctica.
• According to a report on China’s space programme by the U.S. think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the contract between Argentina and China stipulates that Argentina “not interfere or interrupt” activities which only fuelled suspicions of spying.

An alternative to burial or cremation

GS Paper - 3 (Environment)

Recently, New York became the sixth state in the US to legalise human composting as a burial option. Washington was the first to do so in 2019 and soon, states such as Colorado, Oregon, Vermont, and California followed suit. Also known as natural organic reduction, human composting is essentially the process of transforming the human body into nutrient-rich soil. In the past few years, it has gained popularity, especially among the younger generation, for being an eco-friendly alternative to dispose of a corpse.

How does human composting take place?

1. The body is first washed and dressed in a biodegradable grown. It’s then placed in a closed vessel, usually measuring 8 feet by 4 feet, along with selected materials such as alfalfa, straw and sawdust.
2. Inside the container for the next 30 days, the body is left to decompose. To speed up the decay, oxygen is added to the vessel, which results in the unfolding of a process called aerobic digestion, in which microbes start to consume organic matter.
3. Meanwhile, the temperature inside the container is kept around 130 degrees Fahrenheit or 55 degrees Celsius in order to kill off contagions.
4. By time the aerobic digestion is over, the body has been transformed into a soil-like material, containing nutrients, bones and some medical devices — these are taken out from the compost pile and recycled.
5. The contents of the vessel are then ground in a machine to help further break the bones into fragments. Then, the material is occasionally rotated for another 30 days.
6. As the microbial activity comes to an end, the temperature inside the pile drops, marking the transformation from an active composite pile into the soil; After this, the family of the deceased is given the soil, which weighs around 181 kg.

Why human Composting

1. With the global temperature soaring, methods like burials and cremations are increasingly being seen as contributors to carbon emissions.
2. Cremating one body emits an estimated 190 kg of carbon dioxide into the air, which is the equivalent of driving 756 km in a car. Burial has its hazards too — apart from an indefinite use of land, it involves embalming a corpse in toxic solutions, which could be harmful to the soil.
3. Moreover, burials and cremations are quite expensive and not only many can afford them. In the US, traditional funerals cost $7,000 to $10,000 on average.
4. Therefore, human composting — a process that costs around $5,500 including the laying-in ceremony and uses much less energy than cremation — has emerged as a viable option for bidding goodbye to loved ones.
5. The soil produced through this procedure can be used for gardening or can be spread in designated memorial grounds or forest conservation areas.
6. When human composting transforms the organic material of our bodies, carbon is also sequestered in the soil created.
7. Rather than being released as carbon dioxide gas through exhaust during cremation, the carbon matter contained in each body returns to the earth.

‘Mother’ of satellite imaging systems

GS Paper - 3 (Space Technology)

Virginia Norwood, an aerospace pioneer who invented the scanner that has been used to map and study the earth from space for more than 50 years, has died at her home in Topanga, California. She was 96. Her death was announced by the US Geological Survey, whose Landsat satellite program relies on her invention. Her daughter, Naomi Norwood, said that her mother was found dead in her bed on the morning of 27 March 2023.

What was Virginia Norwood’s contribution to satellite imaging?

1. The Landsat satellites, speeding 438 miles above the surface, orbit the earth every 99 minutes and have captured a complete image of the planet every 16 days since 1972.
2. These images have provided powerful visual evidence of climate change, deforestation and other shifts affecting the planet’s well-being.
3. Norwood, a physicist, was the person primarily responsible for designing and championing the scanner that made the program possible. NASA has called her “the mother of Landsat.”
4. At the dawn of the era of space exploration in the 1950s and ’60s, she was working at Hughes Aircraft Co., developing instruments. One of a small group of women in a male-dominated industry, she stood out more for her acumen.
5. In the late 1960s, after NASA’s lunar missions sent back spectacular pictures of Earth, the director of the Geological Survey thought that photographs of the planet from space could help the agency manage land resources.
6. Norwood, who was part of an advanced design group in the space and communications division at Hughes, canvassed scientists who specialized in agriculture, meteorology, pollution and geology.
7. She concluded that a scanner that recorded multiple spectra of light and energy, like one that had been used for local agricultural observations, could be modified for the planetary project that the Geological Survey and NASA had in mind.

How were these techniques used by NASA?

1. The Geological Survey and NASA planned to use a giant three-camera system designed by RCA, based on television tube technology that had been used to map the moon.
2. The bulk of the 4,000-pound payload on NASA’s first Landsat satellite was reserved for the RCA equipment.
3. Norwood and Hughes were told that their multispectral scanner system, or MSS, could be included if it weighed no more than 100 pounds.
4. Norwood had to scale back her scanner to record just four bands of energy in the electromagnetic spectrum instead of seven, as she had planned. The scanner also had to be high precision. In her first design, each pixel represented 80 meters.
5. The device had a 9-by-13-inch mirror that banged back and forth noisily in the scanner 13 times a second. The scientists at the Geological Survey and NASA were skeptical.

Linkage between ‘flash droughts’ and climate change

GS Paper -3 (Environment)

A new study has found flash droughts, the kind that arrive quickly and can lay waste to crops in a matter of weeks, are becoming more common and faster to develop around the world, and human-caused climate change is a major reason.

More about the news:

• As global warming continues, more abrupt dry spells could have grave consequences for people in humid regions whose livelihoods depend on rain-fed agriculture.
• The study found that flash droughts occurred more often than slower ones in tropical places like India, Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and the Amazon basin.
• According to a study published in Science: ‘A global transition to flash droughts under climate change’, even for slow droughts, the onset speed has been increasing.
• The researchers looked at data from computer models on soil moisture worldwide between 1951 and 2014.
• They focused on drought episodes that were 20 days or longer, to exclude dry spells that were too short to cause much harm.

How have such events heightened?

• The world has probably always experienced rapid-onset droughts, but only in the past decade or two have they become a significant focus of scientific research.
• New data sources and advances in computer modelling have allowed scientists to analyse the complex physical processes behind them.
• The concept also gained attention in 2012 after a severe drought charged across the United States, ravaging farm fields and pastures and causing over $30 billion in losses, most of them in agriculture.
• According to a climate scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, this kind of rapid drying occurs when it is warm and rain would normally be falling but very little.
• When the precipitation suddenly shuts off, hot, sunny and windy conditions can cause large amounts of water to evaporate quickly.
• The wet seasons there are usually rainy enough to keep land and vegetation damp. But when the rains fail unexpectedly, the equatorial heat can desiccate the ground to devastating effect.

Flashback:

• Drought in India occurs in regions with high as well as sparse rainfall. About 68% of the country is prone to drought at various levels.
• Thirty five percent of the regions receiving rainfall between 750 and 1125 mm are considered drought-prone, and 33% receiving less than 750 mm are subject to chronically drought-prone.