Daily Quiz: UPSC Prelims Marathon – August 2, 2018

Nirbhay is a long range, subsonic cruise  missile being developed in India by Defence Research and Development Organisation. The missile has a good loitering capability i.e., it can  go round a target and perform several manoeuvres and then re-engage it. Its first trial on 12 March 2013 from Chandipur, Odisha was failed. Brahmos is a supersonic cruise missile, while ‘Lakshya’ is an Indian pilot-less target drone system. Nirbhy’s technology is not inspired by it. It is a “tree–top” missile because it can flyover or around hills, can fly at a very low altitude and avoid detection.

A dwarf planet is  a planetary-mass object  that is neither a planet nor a satellite. More explicitly, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) defines a dwarf planet as a celestial body in direct orbit of the Sun that is massive enough for its shape to be controlled by gravitation, but that unlike a planet has not cleared its orbital region of other objects.The point 3 refers to asteroids.

1 Mars year = 23 Earth months = 686.65 days

= 1.88 Earth years

1 Day on Mars = 24 hours 39 minutes 35 seconds Mars has all four seasons that the Earth does, but, since the year is longer on the planet, the axial tilt is different, and Mars has a more  eccentric orbit than Earth, the seasons are not the same length as each other nor are they the same in each hemisphere. In the northern hemisphere spring is the longest season. In the northern hemisphere of Mars the seasons break down like this: Spring – 7 months, Summer – 6 months, Fall – 5.3 months, and Winter – just over 4 months. In the south seasons not exactly the same length as in the north, but they are similar; however, the temperatures can be as much as 30 C warmer.

HD40307g is an exoplanet orbiting in the habitable zone of HD40307. It is located 42 light-years away in the direction of the southern constellation Pictor. The planet was discovered using the European Southern Observatory’s HARPS apparatus by a team of astronomers of University of Hertfordshire and Guillem Anglada-Escude of the University of Goettingen, Germany.

The Mars-500 mission was a psychosocial isolation experiment conducted between 2007 and 2011 by Russia, the European Space Agency and China, in preparation for an unspecified future manned space flight to the planet Mars. The experiment’s idea was to mimic the time scale of a MARS mission.

Hayabusa was an unmanned spacecraft developed by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). Its goal was to return a sample of material from a small near-Earth asteroid named 25143 Itokawa to Earth for further analysis.

Brown dwarfs are substellar objects too low in mass to sustain hydrogen-1fusion reactions in their cores. Red Dwarfs are cool but Brown Dwarfs are cooler than them and it is very large planet.