Ø The Indian Space Research Organisation has
unveiled plans to gradually make its regional satellite navigation system
global — akin to powerful position-telling systems such as the U.S.’ GPS and
the Russian GLONASS. ISRO Chairman A.S. Kiran Kumar said four of the seven
Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS) satellites are in orbit and
the last three spacecraft would be added in orbit by March 2016. The IRNSS
would provide self-reliance in the strategically important area of
position-related information, he said at a users’ conference on global
navigation satellite systems. The focus now was on completing the regional
constellation and extending it to South Asian Association for Regional
Cooperation countries. “After that we will look at taking it gradually over the
entire globe, may be in less than a decade. It could be done by adding a set of
regional satellites over adjoining countries. We are working towards this with
other countries – [South] Korea and the Gulf nations, to name a few,” Mr. Kiran
Kumar said. The signals from the regional system were already available 1,500
km beyond the borders. In April this year, ISRO and the Airports Authority of
India also completed GAGAN, focussed on airlines, airports and the civil
aviation sector but applicable to land and sea-based services. GAGAN enhances
the GPS-derived details of location and time of objects or persons. Both IRNSS
and GAGAN, he said, would drive an unlimited set of personal, public and
industrial users, from transportation, railways, forestry, farming, agriculture
and security. Around 200 navigation receiver sets built by industry and using
ISRO design would be out soon.
Ø While announcing the dramatic shift away from the Indian
military’s traditional opposition to women in combat duties, Air Chief Marshal
Raha did not spell out how soon the historic step would be reflected in the Air
Force. The IAF, at present, has women pilots only for transport aircraft and
helicopters.
Ø vetlana Alexievich, a Belarusian journalist and prose writer, won
the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday “for her polyphonic writings, a
monument to suffering and courage in our time,” the Swedish Academy announced.
Alexievich, 67, is the 14th woman to win the literature prize. Sara Danius,
permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said she had created “a history of
emotions — a history of the soul, if you wish.” Alexievich’s works often blend
literature and journalism. She is best known for giving voice to women and men
who lived through World War II, the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan that
lasted from 1979 to 1989, and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986. “She’s
devised a new kind of literary genre,” Danius said, adding, “It’s a true
achievement not only in material but also in form.” Perhaps her most acclaimed
book is War’s Unwomanly Face (1988), based on interviews with hundreds of women
who took part in the Second World War. The book is the first in a grand cycle,
Voices of Utopia, that depicted life in the Soviet Union from the point of view
of ordinary citizens. In the United States, Alexievich is best known for the
oral history Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
which was translated by the writer Keith Gessen and published in 2005 by Dalkey
Archive Press. The book, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, is a
compilation of interviews with survivors of the nuclear reactor accident. She
spent 10 years visiting the Chernobyl zone, and conducted more than 500
interviews. In an interview posted on the press’s website, Alexievich said her
technique of blending journalism and literature was inspired by the Russian
tradition of oral storytelling.
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