INS Viraat
- INS Viraat, the second aircraft carrier in the Indian naval fleet is soon to be decommissioned. INS Vikrant is India's first aircraft carrier.
- INS Viraat is the second centaur class aircraft carrier in service.
- Earlier known as HMS Hermes, it served Royal Navy of UK from 1950 to 1980's and later re-commissioned in Indian Navy in 1987.
- It holds the Guinness Record for being the oldest-serving warship.
- It played a pivotal role in the Indian peacekeeping operations in Sri Lanka and the 1999 Kargil War.
- It also took part in major operations like Op. Parakram – a India Pakistan in the LOC and Op. Pawan by IPKF to take control of Jaffna from the LTTE as part of the Indo-Sri Lankan accord.
- The latest deployment of Viraat was in the International Fleet Review (IFR-2016) at Visakhapatnam.
MAVEN
- The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN), NASA's spacecraft, has been orbiting mars for the past two years.
- MAVEN is studying Mars’ upper atmosphere, ionosphere and its interactions with the sun and solar wind.
- An important aspect of the MAVEN mission is studying how early Mars lost much of its atmosphere.
- This atmospheric loss may have been partially responsible for Mars’ transition from a planet capable of supporting liquid surface water to the dry, desert world we know today.
- Recently, MAVEN has avoided its head-on collision with phobos, the natural satellite of Mars.
- The other one is Deimos. Phobos is the innermost and larger of the two.
Ochre Colored Pottery (OCP) Culture
- When the Indus Valley Civilization was flourishing, a parallel culture called OCP Culture is thought to have co-existed in the fertile plains between the Ganga and the Yamuna.
- The people who used ochre pottery and their culture are specific to the doab region.
- The first remnants of OCP culture were found in Hastinapur, in Meerut district, in 1951 and later in Eta district of UP.
- OCP marked the last stage of the North Indian Bronze Age and was succeeded by the Iron Age.
- Pottery Culture in Ancient India -
- Indus Valley Civilization - Burnt Black Painted Red Ware
- Iron Age (1000 BC) - Painted Grey Ware in North India and the Gangetic plain and Red Polished ware in Gujarat Area.
Nasi II island
- The island is part of Gahirmatha Scantuary in Odisha, one of the world's largest nesting ground of olive ridley turtles.
- There are seven species of marine turtles in the world.
- The Olive Ridley is the smallest of the sea turtles and omnivorous in diet.
- The olive ridleys are found only in warmer waters, including the southern Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans.
- They are known for their behavior of synchronized nesting in mass numbers, termed arribadas.
- They nests twice/thrice in a year.
- They are listed as Vulnerable in IUCN Red List and in Appendix I of CITES.
- Turtles are adapted to aquatic life whereas Tortoises are almost exclusively land-dwelling animals.
- The term “terrapins” is sometimes used for turtles that are semi-aquatic.
