Top News Highlights- 8 October 2024

India’s Venus Orbiter Mission (VOM)

• Mission Overview: Scheduled for a tentative launch in March 2028, the VOM will be India’s maiden mission to Venus. The mission will have a spacecraft that will study Venus’s environment, atmosphere, and surface.
• Scientific Objectives: The primary objectives of the mission are to study atmospheric dust, airglow, surface topography, and the solar X-ray spectrum of Venus.
• Technological Advances: VOM will validate advanced technologies such as aerobraking and thermal management in Venus’ rugged environment.
• International Collaboration: The mission will carry 19 payloads including international collaborations to make the scientific involvement global.

Draft National Sports Policy (NSP) 2024

• Policy Objectives: NSP 2024 strives for the mobilization of sports infrastructure and talent identification to be harnessed as a whole for national growth.
• Three pillars of development: The policy offers strategies in the areas of economic and social development through sports and is integrated with the 2020 National Education Policy.
• Vision for Growth: More focus on sports as a factor of social and economic change in the country, considering the current population bulge.

Global Framework on Chemicals (GFC) Fund

• Objective of the Fund: Established to facilitate developing countries to handle chemicals and waste in an environmentally friendly manner.
• Environmental Implication: Derived from the reduction of adverse environmental and health impacts resulting from chemicals.
• Strategic Objectives: The GFC fund would foster the development of strong global norms and practice related to chemical and waste handling.

Samsung Strike in Tamil Nadu

• Industrial Concerns: Nokia’s problems belonged to the past, but the current Samsung strike is going to rattle the electronics manufacturing plans for India.
• Economic Concern: Strikes might well dislodge the crown from India to China and shake the electronic production ecosystem in India, making it lose its sheen.
• Workers’ Rights vs. Industrial Growth: The strike has focused attention on the need for a balance between the rights of workers and industrial growth.

CareEdge’s Sovereign Ratings Report

• Global Ratings: CareEdge provided high credit ratings to developed countries and rated India based on its economic resilience and attractiveness for investment.
• Relevance to India: The rating of BBB+ to India accords accept robust recovery, focus on infrastructure improvement, but problems from the global rating standards persist.

Atoms4Food Initiative

• Program Overview: IAEA and FAO have launched this program towards utilizing nuclear technologies to augment farm productivity and food security.
• Technological Applications: Practices like food irradiation and soil moisture measurement seek to provide food globally in sustainable ways.

Key Concepts and Policies:

• Aerobraking: An injection technique into orbit from which one uses the atmosphere of a planet to reduce velocity of a spacecraft.
• Thermal Management Technologies: Techniques to keep the temperatures of spacecraft and instruments, such as that being employed with VOM.
• Biodiversity Credits: They are economic devices that facilitate companies to commit to the conservation of biodiversity efforts not only as a way of neutralizing damage to the environment but, more effectively, as taking an active role in biodiversity.