New Delhi – India’s space agency has developed a supercomputer to tackle complex aerospace problems and other launch issues. The SAGA-220 – or the Supercomputer for Aerospace with GPU Architecture – will be the country’s fastest supercomputer in terms of theoretical peak performance of 220 trillion floating point operations per second, or TeraFLOPS. It will be used by space scientists to ensure that space-related calculations take place more quickly, says S. Satish, spokesman of the Bengaluru-based Indian Space and Research Organization.

New Delhi – A state-run Pawan Hans helicopter carrying an Indian minister and four other people has been missing since April 30 in India’s northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh. The AS350 B-3 was carrying Dorjee Khandu, the chief minister of the state, along with the others. The aircraft’s last radio contact with the ground was about 20 min. after takeoff while flying over Sela Pass along the Chinese border. The incident comes after another Pawan Hans helicopter crashed in Tawang on April 19, killing 17 people and injuring six.

The stalemate between Air India management and its striking pilots continued into the sixth day on May 2 as the national carrier could operate only 40 of its 320 daily domestic flights. Close to 90% of the flights have been canceled due to the strike by more than 800 pilots, an Air India spokesman says. “We will operate only 40 of the total 320 flights throughout the duration of the pilots’ strike ... all flights canceled are domestic, our international operations continue as per schedule,” the spokesman says.