News in Short

• The High Court of Tripura has ruled in favour of the state government over a petition challenging its ownership of Neermahal, a former leisurely getaway of the state’s Manikya monarchs.
• Neermahal’, or lake palace, was built by Maharaja Bir Bikram Kishore Manikya Bahadur and is surrounded by Rudrasagar lake.
• Popularly known as Tripura’s ‘Lake Palace’, it is one of the two palaces in the country surrounded by a water body. The second one is Rajasthan’s ‘Jal Mahal'.

• India plans to start space-to-space tracking and communication of its space assets this year by putting up a new satellite series called the Indian Data Relay Satellite System.
• The IDRSS is planned to track and be constantly in touch with Indian satellites, in particular those in low-earth orbits which have limited coverage of earth.
• In the coming years, it will be vital to Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), whose future expeditions is dotted with advanced LEO missions such as space docking, space station, as well as distant expeditions to moon, Mars and Venus.
• The first beneficiary would be the prospective crew members of the Gaganyaan mission of 2022 who can be fully and continuously in touch with mission control throughout their travel.

• Jawaharlal Nehru University professor CP Chandrasekhar has resigned from a government-appointed committee that was set up to review India’s economic data.
• The Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation had last month set up the Standing Committee on Economic Statistics, led by former chief statistician Pronab Sen.

• A Columbia Engineering team has invented a robotic device that can be used to assist and train people with spinal cord injuries to sit more stably.
• The device works by improving their trunk control, gaining an expanded active sitting workspace without falling over or using their hands to balance.
• The robotic trunk is a motorised-cable driven belt placed on the user’s torso to determine the postural control limits and sitting workspace area in people with spinal cord injuries.
• It delivers forces on the torso when the user performs upper body movements beyond the postural stability limits while sitting
• Spinal cord injuries (SCI) can cause devastating damage, including loss of mobility and sensation.

• NASA has saidthat its planet hunter satellite TESS had discovered an Earth-sized world within the habitable range of its star, which could allow the presence of liquid water.
• The planet, named "TOI 700 d", is relatively close to Earth- only 100 light years away.
• TESS was designed and launched specifically to find Earth-sized planets orbiting nearby stars.
• A few other similar planets have been discovered before, notably by the former Kepler Space Telescope, but this is the first discovered by TESS, which was launched in 2018.