Last week (June 22, 2017), NASA gave a global surprise by launching the world’s lightest and smallest satellite into space. Indians at home and abroad couldn’t help rejoicing in this historic moment since the tiny satellite was made by an 18-year-old young Indian from Tamil Nadu.

Named after India’s eminent nuclear scientist and former President Dr. A P J Abdul Kalam, the satellite KalamSat is the brainchild of Rifath Sharook, an 18-year-old student in Tamil Nadu, and his team. Surprisingly the satellite weighs not more than 64 grams. Rifath Sharook designed and developed KalamSat without any help from professional space scientists and engineers.

The world’s lightest, smallest satellite, KalamSat is a 3.8 cm cube, which can be held on one’s palm. Made of reinforced carbon fiber polymer, the satellite has a totally 3D-printed structure. Equipped with nano Geiger Muller counter, it is supposed to help measure the intensity of radiation in space.

NASA selected Rifath Sharook’s KalamSat satellite through a global competition, ‘Cubes in Space,’ which NASA organized in collaboration with ‘I Doodle Learning,’ an international education company. The challenge was to design an innovative satellite model which could easily fit into a 4-cm cube of 64 grams.

NASA successfully launched KalamSat into space from its Wallop Island facility in Virginia. The total flight time of the rocket carrying the satellite was 240 minutes. Assembled in Chennai, KalamSat was in the micro-gravity environment of space for 125 minutes, and then it fell into the sea. NASA will recover it from the sea and decode the data.

Apart from selecting the world’s lightest satellite KalamSat from India for an experiment, NASA recently awarded two innovative projects of Indian teenagers: Chennai-based student Sai Kiran P’s model of elevator to connect earth with the moon for an interplanetary human settlement, and two Delhi-based students’ underwater human settlement model.

Indian Eagle, a trusted travel partner of Indians in America for booking their cheap air tickets to India from USA, publishes stories of young Indian achievers, shares latest air travel news and lists upcoming Indian events in US cities on Travel Beats, a leading Indian community portal.

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The world had been talking about the potential space tourism to Mars until India flipped over a page and turned the focus to the Moon recently. The Moon has been the talk of the space town since an 18-year-old Indian boy from Chennai proposed to make human settlement possible on the Moon by connecting earth with its sub planet through cost-effective elevators.

Sai Kiran P., a Chennai city student, won the second prize in the NASA Ames Space Settlement Contest 2017 by outwitting other entries in the Grade 12 category. His award-winning thesis titled ‘Connecting Moon, Earth and Space’ and ‘HUMEIU Space Habitats’ on centripetal acceleration to transport humans to the Moon from earth for a feasible interplanetary human settlement has catapulted India to a global attention.

The NASA award-winning Sai Kiran P. started working on the project in 2013 during his stay in Singapore. He took to writing the thesis after his return to Chennai early in 2016. He not only brainstormed an idea to connect two heavenly bodies but also designed cost-effective elevators to make interplanetary human settlement possible. In his words:

“Since it is not economically viable, the only other way is to have faultless elevators connecting the Earth to the Moon, which will span a height of 40,000 kms.”

The Chennai boy emphasized two important aspects of his proposal on transportation of humans from earth to the Moon. The first is design and cost-effectiveness of the proposed elevators between the two celestial bodies. The second is gravity or centripetal acceleration which is a most fundamental requirement of interplanetary human settlement.

Transportation of humans to the Moon through special elevators is not the end of the thesis which earned Chennai-based Sai Kiran P. the second prize in the NASA Ames Space Settlement Contest 2017. The thesis also proposed to set up governance, agriculture and recreation zones on the Moon. The thesis came as a potential alternative to the economically inviable transportation of humans to the Moon via rockets for a cosmic distance of 40,000 kms.

Alongside Sai Kiran P., a total of 138 students of different grades from different parts of India stood out in different categories of the NASA Ames Space Settlement Contest 2017 held by NASA Ames Research Center, San Jose State University, and the National Space Society (NSS). Two students of the 10^th grade – Shashwat G. and Ankita P. from New Delhi – won the grand prize of the 2017 NASA Space Settlement Contest.

Travel Beats is an Indian community portal by Indian Eagle. We celebrate the achievements of young Indians across the world and publish the Indian Diaspora news besides sharing updates on air travel, India tourism, US visa and immigration.

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India is in the news for remarkable achievements of its current generation at home and abroad. Be the achievers Indians or NRIs, India is equally proud of them. Indian-American Sonika Vaid has made her way among the top 10 finalists of American Idol 2016 on one hand and Sataparna Mukherjee, an 18-year old Indian girl from Kolkata has bagged NASA scholarship on the other.

Sataparna Mukherjee, a Class 12 student of St Judes School in Madhyamgram on the outskirts of Kolkata, is one of the five scholars selected by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) from across the world, for its coveted scholarship. The NASA scholarship entitles her to the Goddard Internship Program under the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).

Sataparna Mukherjee, a resident of Kamduni village 30 km from Kolkata in the state of West Bengal, is about to appear for her class 12 final exam this year. As per the Goddard Internship Program (GIP), she will be pursuing graduation and post-graduation at Oxford University in London. She will also do PhD in aerospace engineering as a NASA faculty at NASA’s astrobiology center in London. The NASA scholarship will fund her entire education after the class 12 exams.

How Sataparna Mukherjee from rural Bengal bagged NASA scholarship is an interesting story. She is one of the members of a group, including scientists, on social media. One day in May 2015, she shared her views on ‘Black Hole Theory’ based on her findings on this topic with the group members, and one of the members advised her to post the same on NASA’s website. She got good response from NASA to her views on how ‘Black Hole Theory could be used to create a Time Machine.’ NASA offered Sataparna the most coveted scholarship for the Goddard Internship Program in appreciation of her innovative thoughts.

As a NASA fellow of the Goddard Internship Program, Sataparna Mukherjee will get an opportunity to research on earth science and technology. NASA will be paying her a generous stipend apart from bearing all expenses for her education. It not only brightened her future but also made her father, the headmaster of a primary school, and the entire village proud.

According to her school teachers, Sataparna Mukherjee has always been a brilliant student. Science is her interest and writing is her passion. She had scored 88% in the 10^th class final examination. She will leave for London on August 17.

The IndianEagle Team at Travel Beats congratulates Sataparna Mukherjee on winning the world’s most coveted scholarship and wishes her all the best!

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