Designed by Tamil Nadu teen, India launches world's lightest satellite

MUMBAI: On Thursday , India once again broke a

global space record

by launching the

world's lightest satellite

weighing a

mere 64g

,India called Kalamsat, designed and developed not by professional space scientists and engineers, but an 18-year-old student,

Rifath Sharook

, and his team from

Pallapatti

in

Karur from Tamil Nadu

.

The tiny satellite, named in honour of Abdul Kalam, was flown by a Nasa sounding rocket and the lift-off was from the space agency's Wallop Island facility around 3pm. Kalam had his training in the sounding rocket programme at Wallops Island in the '60s. Kalamsat was the only Indian payload in the mission. Speaking to TOI postlaunch from Chennai, mission director Srimathy Kesan said the total flight time of the rocket was 240 minutes and the satellite, assembled at her T Nagar residence in Chennai, separated from the rocket 125 minutes after lift-off.“Everyone part of the mission cherished and enjoyed the moment,“ said Kesan.

“Kalamsat fell into the sea. It will be recovered and Nasa will be sending it back to us next week for decoding the data,'' she said while pointing out in an emotion-choked voice that the flight was “out of the world and it was a divine intervention.“

Kesan explained, “I am calling it a divine intervention because the previous Nasa mission from Wallops got postponed because of weather and we were able to launch successfully today .“ This oneof-its-kind satellite, which can be held in one's palm is a 3.8cm cube and its structure is fully 3-D printed with reinforced carbon fiber polymer.It is equipped with a nano Geiger Muller counter which will measure radiation in space.

“It is the only cube to be converted into a satellite in this mission. The rest were experiments sent in the cube,“ she added. Rifath, the lead scientist for the project said that Kalamsat, after functioning for 10 to 12 minutes post-launch, came down with other payloads with a parachute. “We are all extremely delighted by the success of this mission,'' he said.

Kalamsat was selected for the flight through a competition called “Cubes In Space“.The challenge was to design a space experiment which could fit into a 4cm cube and weighed a mere 64g. The competition was organised by two US-based organisations--I Doodle Learning and the Colorado Space Grant Consorti um--in partnership with Nasa. On April 5, a Chennaibased organisation, SpaceKidz India, which had teamed up with I Doodle Learning received a message that Kalamsat had been chosen for the flight. Rifath, who hails from a little-known Tamil Nadu town called Pallapatti, is part of SpaceKidz India.

“There were nearly 100 people in our SpaceKidz India office at T Nagar in Chennai on Thursday afternoon anxiously watching the U Stream transmission on computers of the flight. There were a lot of emotional moments.We have already started planning our next space mission,“ Kesan added.

The Kalamsat mission was part of Nasa's Rocket Week celebrations at Wallops, which began on June 17 and concludes on Friday . The event allowed students to become rocket scientists. On Friday , another group of TN college students will be flying their nano satellite on Isro's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle flight.

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