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. NEW DELHI:  The Indian Air Force (IAF) on Thursday successfully landed a C-17 Globemaster transport aircraft at the Mechuka Advanced Landing Ground (ALG) in Arunachal Pradesh. The move is aimed at calibrating India's response capabilities at the border with China. ALGs are airstrips close to the international border. They play a critical role in the defense of the border in remote areas, by enabling the armed forces to either quickly deliver troops to a particular region or supply rations to troops already stationed in remote areas. This is part of a larger efforts of the Air Force to test and increase its capabilities at the ALGs. The C-17 Globemaster - inducted into the IAF in 2013 - is among the largest military transport planes in service and the fact that the Air Force can land it at any ALGs signifies an expansion of the overall military capability in that region. So far, a vast majority of the ALGs have been served by smaller transport aircraft like the AN-32. To put that ...

Two of China's secretive J-20 warplanes swept over a gasping crowd at the Zhuhai air show on Tuesday, potent symbols of Beijing's aspirations to military might. While the J-20 has been extensively filmed since it made its first flight in 2011, this is the first time that it has appeared in an airshow, an indicator that the aircraft is fully developed and in the process of being inducted into the Chinese Air Force. The fighters were not announced on the schedule and appeared in the sky just after a colourful aerobatics show by the People's Liberation Army Air Force. With no fanfare but an abrupt announcement by the master of ceremonies, the dark, powerful jets rumbled side by side over the sun-baked spectators. Two minutes later one blasted vertically into the sky and the jets were gone.  Swift and heavily armed, the warplanes represent a leap forward in China's ability to project power in Asia and compete in capabilities with the United States. Beijing is seeking to ...

A large space rock came fairly close to Earth on Sunday night. Astronomers knew it wasn't going to hit Earth, thanks in part to a new tool NASA is developing for detecting potentially dangerous asteroids. The tool is a computer program called Scout, and it's being tested at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.  Think of Scout as a celestial intruder alert system.  It's constantly scanning data from telescopes to see if there are any reports of so-called Near Earth Objects.  If it finds one, it makes a quick calculation of whether Earth is at risk, and instructs other telescopes to make follow-up observations to see if any risk is real. NASA pays for several telescopes around the planet to scan the skies on a nightly basis, looking for these objects. "The NASA surveys are finding something like at least five asteroids every night," says astronomer Paul Chodas of JPL. But then the trick is to figure out which new objects might hit Earth. "When ...