KalamSat plants seeds of possible human mission

PUNE: A hitherto unknown aspect of the record-breaking KalamSat mission, the launch of the world’s smallest and lightest satellite designed by Tamil Nadu students, was that it kept in view the possibility of a human mission to the moon and the Mars in the future.
The tiny satellite, which weighed a mere 64g, was launched by Nasa on June 22. It was designed and developed at the T Nagar residence of the mission director Srimathy Kesan in Chennai.The KalamSat team was presented the P A Inamdar Young Achievers Award on Monday at the Maharashtra Cosmopolitan Education Society at its Azam campus.
In an interaction with students, Rifath Sharook, lead scientist, said among the payloads in the small spacecraft were 5g of seeds, including those of fig, basil and sunflower.
“We exposed them to a microgravity environment and we want to assess its impact on them. We also want to see the impact of cosmic radiation on these seeds. For the purpose of evaluation, we will plant half the seeds and send the remaining half to a biology research centre for analysis,” he said, while adding if humans have to become an interplanetary species then agriculture in space will play an important role.
Mission biologist T Gopinath said the seeds were acquired from Bengaluru. “We want to see how they react without soil and water,” he said.
Kesan said Nasa will be sending back the spacecraft soon and after that the process of decoding the data will begin, which will be shared.
Asked why the spacecraft was not launched by Isro, the KalamSat team said they have been asked this question 900 times in the last few days. “Nasa gives a lot of opportunity to students. In India, we are a bit conservative,’’ Kesan added.
Harshvardhan Sinhzala from Ahmedabad, was also given a similar award for developing a drone.