R ARIVANANTHAM
A nano-satellite built by the students using indigenous products and named after one of the founding fathers of India’s space programme will carry a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, a photograph of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and names of 25,000 individuals to space on Sunday.
A group of ten students from different colleges in and around Chennai was mentored by SpaceKidz India, said its founder and CEO Dr. Srimathy Kesan on Friday.
Speaking with navjeevanexpress.com she said, the 1.9 kg Nano-Satellite was named Satish Dhawan Satellite or SD SAT, it will be put into orbit by the PSLV-C51 polar satellite launch vehicle from ISRO’s Rocket launching facility at Sriharikotta in Andhra Pradesh.
The SD SAT is one of the two satellites developed by Indian startups that will be launched for the first time by ISRO after the government last year approved the creation of a new organisation, named IN-SPACe, to ensure greater private participation in the country’s space activities.
This move by the government has encouraged us to design the nano-satellite and we are allowed to use the testing facilities of ISRO during the last 9 months, Dr. Kesan said.
“When we finalised the mission, we asked people to send in their names that will be sent to space. And, within a week we received 25,000 entries. Of these, 1,000 names were sent in by people from around the globe. We decided to do this because it will spark the interest of the people in the mission and space science,” Dr Srimathy Kesan.
The names of ISRO chairperson Dr K Sivan and scientific secretary Dr R Umamaheswaran have also been etched on the bottom panel of the satellite
We have also engraved the name and photograph of the Prime Minister on the top panel with his flagship mission Aatmanirbhar Bharat.
The satellite, developed by SpaceKidz India, will carry three payloads — to study space radiation, to study the magnetosphere, and the last one will demonstrate a low-power wide-area communication network.
The nano-satellite also tests the capabilities of LoRa technology in space, which could be helpful for many applications in the future in short and M2M communication.
