Daily Current Affairs Prelims 15 May 2024

NISAR is a joint initiative of India and the U.S. which will measure Earth’s changing ecosystems, dynamic surfaces, and ice masses providing information about biomass, natural hazards, sea level rise, and groundwater, and will support a host of other applications.
This is a Synthetic Aperture Radar satellite with two bands — S-band and L band.
The S-band payload has been made by the ISRO and the L-band by the U.S and the U.S. will also contribute to the large deployable antenna.
It can fully cover the earth in approximately 14 to 15 days, in radar. It gives full coverage of the earth two times a month.
It can monitor the tectonic movements to centimetre accuracy. It can measure water bodies accurately.
It can look at water stressing on the earth, wherever there is a deficiency of water.
It can ground-penetrate to a certain depth. It is capable of monitoring the vegetation cover and snow cover. Therefore, basically It looks at the whole of the earth in terms of surface, water, greenery and all of that.
This data will be available to both India and the U.S. It can measure tectonic plate movements accurately.
We can study climate change-related issues, agricultural changes through patterns, yield, desertification and continental movements precisely.
Though it can penetrate the ground, it can not detect buried archaeological sites which will require radar near the surface.

Dig Deeper: Read about Chandrayan-4 and India’s plans to land humans on the moon.

The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has extended the ban on the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) for another five years due to the group’s continued efforts to foster separatist tendencies, particularly in Tamil Nadu, threatening India’s territorial integrity.
Declared an unlawful association under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967, the LTTE has sympathizers abroad spreading anti-India propaganda.
The LTTE was last banned in 2019. Despite its military defeat in Sri Lanka in May 2009, the LTTE continues to pursue its ‘Eelam’ goal through clandestine fundraising and propaganda activities.
The MHA has observed ongoing activities of pro-LTTE organizations and individuals, including criminal activities like smuggling illegal drugs and arms.
The Ministry stated that LTTE leaders, operatives, and supporters remain hostile to India’s policies.

Dig Deeper: Read about the provisions of the UAPA, 1967, which have been in discussion recently.

Bio-energy projects set up by the Uttarakhand Renewable Energy Development Agency (UREDA), to use pine needles for generating electricity have been unsuccessful.
In 2023, the Uttarakhand government said it was unable to meet its renewable power purchase obligations (under which a minimum percentage of the power it procured and supplied was to be from renewable energy sources)
As its expectations of power from pirul (pine needle) projects did not materialise due to unsustainable technology as of now.
It was an attempt to reduce the available pine needle load as:
Annual forest fires becoming more severe, partly from climate change accentuated drought spells.
Rising stores of organic biomass, including pine needles and agricultural residue.
The Supreme Court had earlier reprimanded the Uttarakhand in the wake of the forest fires.

Dig Deeper: Do you know about plantations of Chir Pine replacing native Oak forests in the 19th century? Also, read about sustainable Bio-energy Power plants.

The National Investigation Agency (NIA) chargesheet says the ‘China-Myanmar module’ of the Isak-Muivah faction of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN-IM) supported the cadres of two banned Meitei outfits (Kanglei Yaol Kanba Lup and People’s Liberation Army of Manipur).
To infiltrate India to exploit the current ethnic unrest in Manipur.
To carry out violent terror attacks targeting the rival Kuki-Zo community with prohibited arms and ammunition.
The NIA registered cases under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) and other sections of law to probe the larger conspiracy.
Weapons training camp organised in Selloi Langamai Ecological Park near Keikhu, Manipur by PLA cadres.
NSCN-IM has promised a safe passage along with arms, ammunition, and other terrorist hardware to Manipur-based terrorist outfits.

Dig Deeper: Read about various terrorist groups of Northeastern states and also list Protected Areas of Manipur.

The aurorae are created when some violent events on the Sun’s surface throw up a mass of charged particles into space.
A geomagnetic storm happens on the Earth when charged particles become trapped in the planet’s magnetic field and interact with atoms in the upper atmosphere.
These interactions finally produce aurorae.
These storms are rare, occurring around once in a few decades.
The last time charged particles from the Sun blew into the earth with similar energy and intensity was in 2003.
Both events happened as the Sun was nearing the peak of its solar cycle — an 11-year period during which the star’s magnetic field flips.
It creates magnetically active patches on the star’s surface called sunspots. These sunspots grow and shrink as solar cycles begin and end.
In the last solar cycle, no sunspot gave rise to a geomagnetic storm that matched the intensity.
For example, since early May 2024, scientists have been monitoring the sunspot AR 3664. It was growing in size; within a week it was 16 times as wide as the earth and brimming with magnetic energy.
The supercharged magnetic fields in such sunspots sometimes disconnect and reconnect in fractions of a second, releasing a great burst of energy that sends plumes of charged particles called coronal mass ejections (CMEs) into space.
CMEs happen together with solar flares (powerful flashes of radiation) and all these active events are collected under the term ‘solar storms’
Magnetic fields deflect charged particles, but the earth couldn’t prevent many of the particles from slipping through to locations close to the planet’s magnetic poles.
Here, their interactions with oxygen atoms in the upper atmosphere produced vivid red light and with oxygen and nitrogen in the lower atmosphere produced green and purple light, respectively. Thus, the world had its aurorae.

Dig Deeper: Read about the Role of Aditya L1 in anticipating a solar storm.