News About NASA

2. Rare comet will be visible from Earth for first time: NASA • A rare comet discovered by NASA scientists will be visible using just binoculars to skywatchers on Earth this week for the first time, before the object heads back into outer reaches of the solar system for an orbit lasting thousands of years. • The comet, C/2016 U1 NEOWISE, "has a good chance of becoming visible through a good pair of binoculars, although we can't be sure because a comet's brightness is notoriously unpredictable," said Paul Chodas, manager of NASA's Centre for Near-Earth Object (NEO) Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the US.

3. NASA image shows Saturn's north pole basking in sunlight • NASA's Cassini spacecraft has captured a stunning image of Saturn, showing the whole northern region of the ringed planet bathed in sunlight. • The image from late 2016 obtained at a distance of about 1.2 million kilometres from Saturn shows a hexagon-shaped jet-stream which is fully illuminated. • The planet appears darker in regions where the cloud deck is lower, such the region interior to the hexagon, NASA said. • Mission experts on Saturn's atmosphere are taking advantage of the season and Cassini's favourable viewing geometry to study this and other weather patterns as Saturn's northern hemisphere approaches Summer solstice.

4. Top trends in the technology space in 2016 • The year 2016 has been a packed year when it comes to technology, with some of the biggest trends emerging out of India. From a $20 billion investment on setting up a 4G network to Aadhaar now becoming part of the “billion club” that only companies such as Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft have been members of. • Here are the top 10 technology trends for the year gone by: • A Billion Aadhaar • Year of Make in India for phones • Google becomes a hardware maker • Reusable rockets • Reliance Jio

5. Top trends in the technology space in 2016 • Year of self-driving • Uber out of China • Drone deliveries • Google WiFi at Indian train stations • ISRO goes private

6. Five important technological breakthroughs in 2016 • The digital and technology space is changing at such a rapid space that it's easy to get lost in the sea of new developments. However, there are some disruptions that leave an indelible mark and make a great impact in our lives. Business Standard takes a look at five such technological breakthroughs in 2016: • The concept of AI has been there for a long time. What speeded up R&D in this field is the increase in computing power of systems and advancement in AI research. Instead of programming everything a computer has to do, researchers fed large amount of data into the system and got the computer to figure out how to get the result with the given inputs. In March 2016, Google's AlphaGo, a computer algorithm, beat world champion Lee Se-do in the ancient Chinese board game of Go. The event was significant because the game involves moves based on intuition. This year AI entered the mainstream, already giving a taste of its power through chatbots and personal assistants. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg built his own a home Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistant called Jarvis, which can perform tasks like switching lights on and off, identifying people at the door, playing music, preparing toasts, scheduling etc. Although at the experimental stage, the AI is coming to home sooner than though with other products like Amazon's Echo and Google's Google Home.