Important Current Affairs 4th December 2018 English

(National news)

Train 18 Crosses 180 kmph Speed Limit 
India’s first locomotive-less train, known as Train 18, breached the 180 kmph speed limit during a test run in the Kota-Sawai Madhopur section.
When this 100-crore indigenously designed train is made operational, it will become the country’s fastest train.
On October 29, the high-tech, energy-efficient, self-propelled (engine-less) train was flagged off here by Railway Board Chairman Ashwani Lohani.With 16 coaches, the train will have the same passenger carrying capacity as that of the Shatabdi Express.

(International news)

Soyuz 
A Soyuz rocket carrying Russian, American and Canadian astronauts took off from Kazakhstan and reached orbit on Monday, in the first manned mission since a failed launch in October.
Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko, Anne McClain of NASA and David Saint-Jacques of the Canadian Space Agency blasted off for a six-and-a-half month mission on the International Space Station at 1131 GMT.
The Soyuz is the only means of reaching the ISS since the U.S. retired the space shuttle in 2011.
About ISS    
The International Space Station (ISS) is a space station, or a habitable artificial satellite, in low Earth orbit. Its first component launched into orbit in 1998, with the first long-term residents arriving in November 2000. It has been inhabited continuously since that date.

(Science news)

NASA’s Osiris-Rex Spacecraft
After a two-year chase, a NASA spacecraft arrived on December 3 at the ancient asteroid Bennu, its first visitor in billions of years.
It is the first U.S. attempt to gather asteroid samples for return to Earth, something only Japan has accomplished so far.
Japan managed to return some tiny particles in 2010 from its first asteroid mission , also named Hayabusa.
Japan managed to return some tiny particles in 2010 from its first asteroid mission , also named Hayabusa.

GSAT-11 Ready For The Launch
A team of top officials and engineers of the Indian Space Research Organisation (IISRO), now stationed in the Guiana Space Centre, South America, is going over the last steps before it sees off the heaviest Indian communication satellite, GSAT-11, to its space orbit. The liftoff is slated for the wee hours of Wednesday, December 5, India time.
GSAT-11 is part of ISRO’s new family of high-throughput communication satellite (HTS) fleet that will drive the country's Internet broadband from space to untouched areas.
Already up in space are two HTSs — GSAT-29 (November 14) and GSAT-19 (June 2017) — while one more is due to join them in the near future. They are all to provide high-speed Internet data services at the rate of 100 Gbps (Gigabits per second) to Indian users.
Its co-passenger is South Korea’s GEO-KOMPSAT-2A, a meteorology satellite.