World News
Successful orbit entry for India’s Chandrayaan-3 lunar mission
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Steph Deschamps / August 6, 2023
An unmanned rocket launched by India entered the Moon’s orbit on Saturday, four years after a first failed controlled lunar landing attempt, announced the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO).
If the rest of the current mission goes according to plan, the mission should land near the Moon’s little-explored south pole between August 23 and 24.
The world’s most populous country, with over 1.4 billion inhabitants, would then join the club that has successfully completed a controlled lunar landing, which currently includes only Russia, the USA and China.
Developed by ISRO, Chandrayaan-3 comprises a lander named Vikram, meaning “valour” in Sanskrit, and a rover, a mobile robot, named Pragyan, meaning “wisdom” in Sanskrit, which will explore the Moon’s surface.
Chandrayaan-3 took much longer to reach the Moon than the manned Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s, which arrived in a matter of days.
The Indian rocket is much less powerful than the Saturn V, the rocket used in the American Apollo lunar program. It completed five or six elliptical orbits around the Earth to gain speed, before being sent on a month-long lunar trajectory.
Since the launch of a probe into lunar orbit in 2008, India’s space program has expanded considerably. In 2014, India became the first Asian country to put a satellite into orbit around Mars, and three years later launched 104 satellites in a single mission.
By next year, the Asian giant is set to launch a three-day manned mission in orbit around the Earth.
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Sylvie Claire / September 23, 2023
At least 25 people, including two children, died when a bus crashed into a ravine in the Andean region of Huancavelica, in southern Peru, the authorities announced in a revised death toll on Monday evening.
An initial police report put the death toll at 20, with a further 35 injured. A statement from the Ministry of Health later that morning put the death toll at 24. Finally, at the end of the day on Monday, the death toll stood at “25 dead and 34 wounded”, according to the Ministry of Defense.
The accident occurred on Sunday night, when the bus carrying over 50 passengers from Huanta in Ayacucho to Huancayo in the Junin region ran off the road.
Images show the damaged bus lying on its side near a river below the ravine, debris and personal belongings strewn all around.
Peruvian President Dina Boluarte expressed her “condolences to the families” from New York, where she will be attending the 78th General Assembly of the United Nations. The Peruvian Episcopal Conference, for its part, urged the government to “carry out a serious investigation” to prevent such accidents from happening again.
On August 13, another accident in the same region left 13 people dead and 5 seriously injured.
Road accidents are frequent in Peru, mainly due to speeding and poor road maintenance, especially in mountainous areas.
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Sylvie Claire / September 17, 2023
In Japan, the number of people aged 100 has reached a record level: the world’s third-largest economy now has 92,139 people aged 100 or over. That’s 1,613 more than a year ago, reported the Ministry of Health in Tokyo on Friday.
For over half a century, the number of people aged 100 has been rising every year. Due to a low birth rate and almost non-existent immigration, no other industrial state is aging as fast as this East Asian country.
Japan’s population is also shrinking at a record pace. Last year, the number of Japanese fell by 801,000, the biggest drop since comparable data have been recorded. There are now 122.4 million.
When the Japanese Ministry of Health began compiling statistics in 1963, there were 153 centenarians. Twenty-five years later, there were over 10,000. According to the latest figures, around 88% of centenarians are women. Japan has the longest life expectancy in the world. Life expectancy for women is around 87 years, and 81 for men.
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Steph Deschamps / September 17, 2023
The death toll from the earthquake in Morocco has risen to 2,946, the Moroccan Ministry of the Interior announced on Wednesday evening. A further 5,674 people were injured.
The previous death toll was 2,901. The death toll is expected to rise further. Hopes of finding survivors are now very slim. Rescue workers have not yet been able to reach all the villages affected in the Atlas Mountains.
A magnitude 6.8 earthquake struck the country on Friday night. The epicenter was located some 80 kilometers southwest of Marrakech. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), over 300,000 people in and around Marrakech were affected by the disaster.
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