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.
