Day: September 2, 2021

(Xinhua)16:35, November 25, 2020

South Australia (SA) has revealed a long-term strategy for its space industry, revealing plans for food production in space and launching satellites.

The state, which is home to the Australian Space Agency, on Wednesday released its Space Sector Strategy, outlining plans to use the burgeoning industry to accelerate the local economic recovery from the COVID-19 crisis.

Goals listed in the plan include SA playing an active role in contributing to efforts towards food production in space, leveraging the states expertise in food production for extreme environments to support international human spaceflight missions.

It identified the University of Adelaide and Adelaide Botanic Gardens as having the capability to help work on food production in space.

If the goals are achieved the strategy said that SA would become the Australian centre of expertise in space-based farming and food production.

While traditional space-related services fundamentally underpin our way of life on Earth and deliver a large proportion of the revenue attributed to the space sector, there are phenomenal opportunities for the new breed of space-related services that are unencumbered by legacy practice, Richard Price, chief executive of the SA Space Industry Centre, said in a media release on Wednesday.

The Strategy said that it means a focus on launch into accessible lower Earth orbits, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to exploit space-derived data, technological advances to develop small satellites, expanding a skilled workforce, and building on the states innovation ecosystem.

Steven Marshall, the premier of SA, said that the Strategy aims to drive the states contribution to the Australian Space Agency goal of tripling the size of the nations domestic space industry to 12 billion Australian dollars (8.8 billion U.S. dollars) by 2030.

Our vision for growth is simple, by 2030, South Australia will be designing, manufacturing, launching, and operating SmallSats (small satellites) to deliver actionable, space-derived intelligence for sovereign Australian missions, creating hundreds of jobs in the process, he said.

(Xinhua)16:57, November 25, 2020

Russias Federal Security Service (FSB) announced on Wednesday it had prevented terror attacks planned by an Islamic State group in the Moscow region.

Russias FSB has thwarted activities of a cross-regional IS cell, participants of which intended to conduct subversive terror attacks in the Moscow region, the FSB said in a press release.

Security officers have detained one person, who is a citizen of a Central Asian country, in the Vladimir region, and seized a home-made bomb.

The FSB said that an improvised explosive device filled with destructive agents and some other items and documents were retrieved.

An investigation is underway.

(Xinhua)16:58, November 25, 2020

Mongolia reported 27 more COVID-19 cases in the past 24 hours, according to the countrys National Center for Communicable Diseases (NCCD) on Wednesday.

Mongolia conducted 3,301 tests for COVID-19 in the past 24 hours, Amarjargal Ambaselmaa, head of the NCCDs Surveillance Department, told a press conference.

The national caseload has risen to 699, including 272 locally transmitted cases so far.

Domestically transmitted cases have been reported in the capital city of Ulan Bator and provinces of Selenge, Darkhan-Uul, Govisumber, Orkhon and Dornogovi.

The first local transmission case was believed to be a woman whose 29-year-old husband, a transport driver, returned from Russia and tested positive for the virus four days after he was released from 21-day mandatory isolation on Nov. 6.

The Asian country has imposed a nationwide lockdown until Dec. 1 to halt the spread of the pandemic and identify all people who had contact with locally transmitted COVID-19 patients.