Current Events (December 2022)

Current Events

FIFA World Cup With 3 Women Referees
1st December 2022 in a historic first, woman referee took charge at the Men’s Football World Cup.

FIFA promotes gender equality when French referee Stephanie Frappart and her two assistants, Brazil’s Neuza Back and Mexico’s Karen Diaz Medina, conducted the match between Germany and Costa Rica. Yamashita Yoshimi, Salima Mukansanga and Kathryn Nesbitt are the other World Cup Assistant Referees, selected for the tournament. Significantly, the historic moment took place in Qatar where authorities treat women as legal minors in their own country

Ms. Sukla Mistry (our alumnus of 1985 batch of students, Metallurgical Engineering, & The Director (Refineries) at Indian Oil, bagged the Gold Trophy for Stevie Woman of the Year (Manufacturing category) and the Silver Trophy for Woman of the Year (Industry category).

The world’s premier Stevie Awards for Women in Business were presented on November 12, 2022, in an award ceremony held in Las Vegas, USA. She is among the very few Indians recognised on this global platform and the first from Indian Oil.

The Stevie® Awards for Women in Business are the world’s premier business awards, created to honour and generate public recognition of the achievements and positive contributions of working women professionals worldwide. With this award, Ms Mistry joins an elite club of global women leaders, who have set benchmarks of leadership excellence in their respective fields and continue to inspire young women professionals to scale new peaks every day.

ISRO—INDIA

On 23rd October 2022, The Indian Space Research Organisations’ LVM3-M2 rocket on its maiden commercial mission successfully placed 36 broadband communication satellites of a UK-based customer into the intended orbits. The space agency described the mission as “historic”.
Heaviest rocket: The LVM3-M2 rocket carried the heaviest payloads with 36 satellites of OneWeb, becoming the first Indian rocket with a payload of 5,796 kg. The vehicle is also called as one of the heaviest for its ability to carry satellites up to 8,000 kg.

OneWeb Ltd is the UK-based customer of NewSpace India Ltd (NSIL), ISRO’s commercial arm, and a global communication network powered from space, enabling internet connectivity for governments and businesses. Bharti Enterprises is one of the major investors in OneWeb.

Past glitch: With this success ISRO put behind the anomaly experienced in its August 7 Small Satellite Launch Vehicle (SSLV) mission, that had then made the satellites unusable due to orbital issues. Mission accomplished: All the 36 satellites were injected into the orbits around 75 minutes after the rocket blasted off from the Sriharikota spaceport at 12.07 am.

A constellation of satellites: This is OneWeb’s 14th launch, bringing the constellation to 462 satellites. This launch represents more than 70 per cent of its planned 648 low earth orbit (LEO) satellite fleet that it said will deliver high-speed, low-latency connectivity worldwide.

ISRO: The space agency launched India’s first privately developed rocket, Vikram-S, marking a milestone in the country’s efforts towards creating a commercial space industry. The 545-kg rocket developed by space startup Skyroot took off from ISRO’s launch site near Chennai. The rocket has the capability of reaching Mach 5, which is five times the speed of sound. PM Modi called it a “historic moment”. ISRO comes under the Department of Science, which reports to the PM’s office.

Ganga Vilas, India’s New Luxury River Cruise Vessel

Ganga Vilas will be launched in January 2023 and will be our new luxury river cruise vessel with 18 suites and all other associated facilities. It would be the World’s longest luxury river cruise covering 4,000 km From Varanasi to Dibrugarh, Assam, a river journey of 50 days covering 27 river systems. including the Sundarbans Delta and Kaziranga National Park, and about 1,100 km in Bangladesh.

The cruise will be operated under the PPP model by the Inland Waterways Authority of India (IWAI), Antara Luxury River Cruises and JM Baxi River Cruises.

Russia – Ukraine War, & the Kamikaze Drone
Ukrainian capital Kyiv came under attack by kamikaze Drones on Monday morning, causing damage to several residential and commercial buildings. No casualty figure is available yet.
This is the second wave of kamikaze attacks unleashed by Russia on Ukraine in just over a week.

‘Kamikaze’ derives from a tactic of attack adopted by the Japanese during World War II. Pilots of fighter planes laden with explosives, in a suicide attack mission, would crash into an enemy target to cause maximum damage.
DATA:-
• Effects on Target. Anti-Armor and Anti-Personnel Effects.
• Link Range. Threshold: 40 km. Objective: 90+ km.
• Endurance. 40+ min.
• Weight. AUR: 50 lb (22.7 kg) Missile: 33 lb (14.97) System (1 AUR and FCS): 120 lb (54.4 kg)
• Speed. Cruise: 70 MPH (61 kts) Dash: 115 MPH (100 kts)
• According to the Ukrainian online publication Defence Express, which cites Iranian data, the delta-wing drone is 3.5m long, 2.5m wide and weighs approximately 200kg.3 days ago
• These are small unmanned aircraft that are packed with explosives that can be flown directly at a tank or a group of troops that are destroyed when it hits the target and explodes.
• They are called Switchblade because their bladelike wings spring out on launch.
• The drones have the capability of going past traditional defences to strike its targets and also cost a fraction of what the larger counterparts do.
• These small lethal drones are difficult to detect on radar, and they can even be programmed to hit targets without human intervention, based on facial recognition.
• Countries Possess such Drones:
• Although the Kamikaze might be the most advanced form of this genre of drones, Russia, China, Israel, Iran and Turkey all have some version of it.
• Light Weight: Weighing just five-and-a-half pounds, including its small warhead, the Switchblade can be taken into battle in a backpack and fly up to 7 miles to hit a target.
• Can Adjust Blast Radius: The Switchblade has a feature that allows the operator to adjust the blast radius. So, it can kill the driver of a vehicle but not a passenger, for example. The weapon can be “waived off” up to two seconds before impact.
• A blast radius is the distance from the source that will be affected when an explosion occurs.
• Cameras for Centralised View of Area of Operation:
• The Switchblade also has cameras that show a target seconds before impact.
• The drone cruises at 63 miles per hour and provides “operators with real-time video downlinks for a centralized view of the area of operation”.