A teenager from India has just achieved something astonishing, and NASA engineers were amazed at the results.
NASA is about to launch an amazing piece of technology into space, and it’s all thanks to a remarkable teenager. The agency supports a competition to build a functioning satellite, and were blown away when 18-year-old Rifath Shaarook from India built the world’s lightest satellite, winning the competition.
NASA will launch the tiny 64-gram satellite, which will conduct a four-hour sub-orbital mission after being launched from the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia on June 21, according to reports. The objective of the satellite will be test the durability of its casing, which was 3D-printed.
Sharook entered the invention into the Cubes in Space competition, which isn’t run by NASA, but is supported by the agency. Students were challenged with inventing a device that could fit in a cube no bigger than four meters, and weighing no more than 64 grams.
Shaarook told Business Standard: “We designed it completely from scratch. It will have a new kind of on-board computer and eight indigenous built-in sensors to measure acceleration, rotation and the magnetosphere of the earth. The main challenge was to design an experiment to be flown to space which would fit into a four-metre cube weighing 64 grammes.”
“Kalam SAT is to be the world’s lightest space probe (till May, 2017) that is named after former Indian president Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, will be launched by NASA on 21 June, 2017 from Wallops Island,” states the Wikipedia article on Kalam SAT, the name of the satellite. “The probe was built by Rifath Sharook, an 18 year old student from Pallapatti, Tamil Nadu, India, as a part of a competition, named as – ‘Cubes in Space’. This contest was jointly organised by NASA and another organisation ‘I Doodle Learning’ which is a global education company. This will be the first time when a space probe, that was made by an Indian student will be launched by NASA.”
Daniel J. Brown
Daniel J. Brown (Editor-in-Chief) is a recently retired data analyst who gets a kick out of reading and writing the news. He enjoys good music, great food, and sports, with a slant towards Southern college football, basketball and professional baseball.