 "the team working on PISAT at CoRI in PES University")
For the past few months, Bengaluru-based research associate Kavya Shree has been consistently tracking two of Indian Space Research Organisation's (Isro) satellites, the Oceansat-2 and Cartosat-2. "It's for practice," she says.
At 9:12 am on September 26, if all goes as planned, Isro will use its reliable Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, PSLV-C35, to fire a 377-kg satellite called SCATSAT-1 for ocean and weather-related studies from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre SHAR, Sriharikota. While SCATSAT-1 will have five foreign co-passengers from Algeria, Canada and the US, piggybacking along on the PSLV will be two student satellites: Pratham from the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay and PISAT from PES University in Bengaluru.
When PISAT first comes over Karnataka's airspace somewhere between 9 pm and 10 pm on the night of September 26, it will be up to Shree and a team of other students from PES to make contact with the satellite and track it as it hovers 680 km to 720 km over the Earth.
There are graphs and beeping machines everywhere at Shree's workspace on the eighth floor of the Panini block at PES. Her workspace is the ground control station, or the PES Satellite Control Facility. On the roof of this floor, a parabolic dish with a diameter of 3.7 m steadily makes its rotations. "That'll help us get in touch with PISAT," says V Samvasiva Rao, a professor at PES University who has been instrumental in building this ground control system. Rao was with Isro for 37 years before he took up teaching.
In the basement of the building lies CoRI, or the Crucible of Research & Innovation, the lab where PISAT was first conceptualised. Within this lab, there's another, more secluded workspace. Four students in crystal blue lab coats zealously work on circuit systems and different monitors here. As we enter, two of these students hurriedly approach and hand us fresh anti-static coats. As students personally vested in building spacecraft, their concern is that human bodies, which carry a lot of charge, could harm the sensitive components in the room.
Even as they formulate plans for the next satellite, an updated version of PISAT, the students are busy checking if everything is on track with the cube-satellite that was moved to Sriharikota over two weeks ago to be integrated with the PSLV-C35. Their 5-kg nanosatellite carries an imaging camera to capture an imagery of 185 km x 135 km area with about 80m/pixel resolution. Simply put, this satellite will take pictures of Earth that can be downloaded at scheduled times at CoRI.
After PISAT was tested at Isro, six students accompanied the satellite to Sriharikota and spent a week there, working alongside scientists on the launch.
The SRMSat launched by students of SRM University in Chennai; PISAT, developed by students of PES University, before its final touches
"We couldn't click any photos since the area was restricted, but we've come back with a lot of stories," says Gaurav Agarwal, a student who was at Sriharikota, adding that he's lost count of the number of times he's repeated the stories. "I stay in the boys' hostel, so we've been up every night talking about our experiences there."
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LAUNCHPAD Student satellites launched in the past | |||||
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ANUSAT April 2009 Anna University, Chennai |
STUDSAT July 2010 Seven engineering colleges from Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh |
JUGNU October 2011 IIT-Kanpur | |||
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SRMSat October 2011 SRM University, Chennai |
SWAYAM June 2016 College of Engineering, Pune |
SATHYABAMASAT June 2016 Sathyabama University, Chennai | |||
The best part of being at Sriharikota, says Agarwal, was interacting with scientists during the test cycles that can take up to 36 hours. "They told us about their ongoing researches and asked us about ours," he says. "We learnt that there's no reason we should ever back down because there's a solution to every problem."
the team working on PISAT at CoRI in PES University
The idea behind student satellites, explains Isro spokesperson Deviprasad Karnik, "is to encourage educational institutions and the student community to have a hands-on experience when it comes to building spacecraft." Isro provides students with expert guidance once their proposals have been accepted. It also gives them access to testing procedures.
Since April 2009, Isro has launched six student satellites; PISAT and IIT-Bombay's Pratham will boost this count on Monday.
Pratham's story began eight years ago when aerospace engineering students Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay and Shashank Tamaskar approached the institute with the idea of building a satellite. They started by partially setting up a ground station and zeroing in on a payload (core functionality), before convincing Isro to back the idea. Financed by IIT-Bombay and Isro, it cost about Rs 1.5 crore to build Pratham.
Kavya Shree’s workspace at PES is the ground control station for the satellite
The lab on the ground floor of the aerospace engineering department has become home to various groups of students who've been a part of Pratham's making. "There are no fixed hours, but team members spend an average of two to three hours daily on the project," says Ratnesh Mishra, the current project manager. "Sometimes, they pull all-nighters, working until 3 am and going straight to class in the morning after a nap."
Most of the 30-member team gathers here on Tuesdays and Fridays to fine-tune the design. Students are encouraged to arrive at a solution themselves before approaching the faculty. Much like PISAT, Pratham's is an inter-disciplinary team comprising students from electrical, mechanical, chemical, civil engineering, physics and aerospace departments.
The boundaries between work and pleasure are blurred here: a basketball, a cricket bat and a large weathered couch are part of the decor. A speaker is reserved solely for music. A poster next to the whiteboard used for chalking out plans reads: "There is no free lunch." On their Facebook page, posts announcing dates and results of recruitment tests are spruced up to include media coverage on Pratham.
Michael Griffin, American physicist and former administrator of NASA, has acknowledged the project in an e-mail to the institute: "When I was in college, I was building radios - not satellites! My two visits to India have left me more than a little impressed with Indian aerospace engineers."
Pratham was to be launched by 2010, then it got pushed to 2012. Manpower issues, administrative affairs and technical glitches were some of the reasons for delay. What also hurt was that after seniors graduated, the project was left in the hands of an inexperienced team that had to tackle academics and catch up on the satellite's development. In 2012, the students reportedly considered closing the programme but decided against it because too much work had already gone into it.
After its launch, data from the satellite will be analysed at the institute and will later be made available as an open-source material, says Mishra.
The satellite-making project has benefited students in many ways. "On the technical side, you understand not just how one sub-section of the satellite works but also how it interacts with other sub-sections. You see the bigger picture," adds Mishra.
Another satellite scheduled to be launched later this year is from IIT-Madras. This process started six years ago when three students approached the institute, but it took some time for the faculty to come on board. The main challenge, says R David Koilpillai, dean (planning), was to ensure that the project didn't gradually die out when the students graduated. While the current team for the project is of 30 students, 300-odd students have been a part of it.
Akshay Gulati, who joined IIT-Madras in 2007, was one of the three who had first pitched the idea; he had assured he'd stay back till the project's completion. And he did, turning down job offers from agencies, including Isro. If the testing goes as planned, IIT-Madras will be sending out a nanosatellite by the end of this year. Set to be placed at a height of 600 km to 800 km, the satellite's goal is to study the energy spectrum of charged particles in the upper ionosphere and understand the effects of solar and lightning storms, besides seismic activity.
While the seed fund came from the college, IIT alumni stepped in to pay for the satellite the cost of which is estimated to be around Rs 3 crore. Reportedly, a few gave in as much as Rs 50 lakh. "We owed it to the institution and the alumnus (which infused so much of money) to finish what we started," says Gulati.
Around the same time as IIT-Madras, students at Sathyabama University, Chennai, had also started work on a satellite. Costing about Rs 1.5 crore, this satellite was launched in June to monitor the concentration of greenhouse gases. The next step for these students is to establish a centre to share their learnings.
The opportunity to take on a new challenge, feels Kuldeep Barah, draws many students to space research. Barah, who comes from a family of farmers, is the first in his family to pursue engineering and is currently enrolled at SRM University, Chennai. His college had sent out a satellite in 2011 to study global warming and pollution. The 21-year-old is now part of SRM's team that is working towards sending a satellite to the Moon.
On the orientation day, when Barah heard about the success of SRM's satellite, he realised that's what he wanted to do. Space research, he emphasises, has become the focus of his life.
The student labs where the satellites were designed have become a strange mix of information in binary data and dreams of conquering the final frontier. For many, their seniors may have started these projects, but spending their nights and vacations building a satellite of their own is a legacy these young minds are proud to be a part of.
"They've had to closely study and rework designs; they've had to look at the practical implementations of everything and think outside the box," says Agrawal, the head of CoRI. "These students are better prepared to take on whatever life throws at them. They have become problem-solvers."
Ranjita Ganesan contributed to this article
