The space debris cleanup mission launched by Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has successfully tracked down one of its targets.
During the Commercial Removal of Debris Demonstration, Japan’s Astroscale partnered with JAXA to launch a satellite called ADRAS-J that will demonstrate the capabilities needed to remove space debris from orbit. Last Friday, the two entities revealed that one of the mission’s four objectives – approaching a target closely and observing it from a fixed point while providing continuous images with the required image quality and data volume – had been achieved by the end of May.
The observed object was the upper stage of an H-IIA rocket, which was launched in 2009 to carry the Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite into space. The image below shows that upper stage as seen by ADRAS-J from a distance of just 50 meters.
One of the images of the H-IIA upper stage captured by ADRAS-J – Click to enlarge
The image is said to show that Japan’s goal of developing commercial space cleaning services is making satisfactory progress.
India appoints new technology minister
India’s re-elected government has appointed a new minister in a key technology portfolio.
One minister from the previous government, Ashwini Vaishnaw, retained his position in the cabinet, along with the portfolios of Railways, Information and Broadcasting, and Electronics and Information Technology.
Jitin Prasada was asked to serve as Minister of State in the Electronics and Information Technology portfolio. The previous minister of state for that portfolio, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, unexpectedly decided to end his time in politics.
Singapore tech has reportedly been jailed for deleting former employers’ VMs
An Indian national who once worked for Singapore services company NCS has reportedly been jailed for deleting virtual machines after being fired.
Singapore media reports that the man, who is an Indian national, was released by NCS and returned to his home country, but was still able to log into the company’s services.
He then deleted multiple VMs in a test environment. After the VMs’ disappearance was noticed, authorities reportedly found evidence that the convicted man was looking for scripts that would delete resources. The former employee explained that he was confused and angry after being fired, and was sentenced to two years and eight months in prison.
Hong Kong uses robodog to detect pollution
The Hong Kong government has tested a robot dog as a means of detecting pollution.
A government case study published on Sunday explains that environmental officials currently rely on their own noses to detect pollution.
Law Chi-wing, senior environmental protection officer of the Department of Environmental Protection, said the robodog “provides objective data and quickly tracks the location of such sources.”
The department envisions a future where this gas-sniffing robot dog can replace human researchers when it comes to entering dangerous and confined spaces during pollution investigations, increasing both the efficiency of their investigations and the researchers’ occupational safety.
Forrester predicts a surge in technology spending in APAC
Analyst firm Forrester last week predicted that technology spending in the APAC region would grow 6.4 percent in 2024 to a total of $710 billion.
Compound annual growth rates will remain between 6.4 and 7.4 percent per year from 2024 to 2027, meaning spending in the final year will reach $876 billion.
India will be the fastest growing country in the region by 2024, with a 10.8 percent acceleration in technology spending that exceeds the 8.1 percent in six countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Taiwan and Vietnam ), China’s 7.2 percent, Singapore’s 5.6 percent and Australia’s 4.0 percent growth.
Australia is likely to impose an age requirement for social media
Australia’s two main political parties have both endorsed the idea of restricting access to social media to people over the age of 16.
Late Boomer Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, 61, and Gen-X opposition leader Peter Dutton, 53, have both backed the idea, suggesting age verification will be needed to make this a reality. However, neither has proposed an age verification mechanism.
Last week, Australia also launched an information sharing program aimed at limiting the effectiveness of financial scams. The Australian Financial Crimes Exchange (AFCX) is seeing multiple financial institutions sharing information about scams they have observed or suspected perpetrators. The Exchange will work with other government agencies to identify more scams and fraudsters – in some cases using data provided by social networks.
APAC Deal Book
New deals, partnerships and alliances we saw in the region last week include:
- NTT Data acquired a majority stake in India’s ProvenTech Pvt Ltd – a company that provides quality management and manufacturing solutions to the pharmaceutical, healthcare and food industries using proprietary products, SAP and other business software.
- Australia’s Macquarie Cloud has entered into a “strategic relationship” with Dell and Microsoft, which will see it offer a hybrid cloud service that combines Azure Stack HCI and Dell’s Apex ITaaS service. We’re told customers will get “workload flexibility, a single plane of control, consistent experience, 24×7 mission-critical support and evergreen compliance across public, private and hybrid cloud environments.”
- Huawei has signed a memorandum of understanding with South African telco MTN, in which the pair will “jointly promote the large-scale deployment of Net5.5G’s key capabilities, such as 400GE, SRv6, slicing and Network Digital Map, to enhance MTN’s service to continuously improve consumer and B2B experience and network availability.” Huawei is a leading proponent of 5.5G – an evolution of the wireless standard that includes some elements expected to appear in the 6G specification by the end of this decade.
- Infosys has reportedly secured a deal to gather new IT capacity for IKEA. The deal would see the Indian group hire hundreds of IKEA IT employees across Europe in search of innovation.
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