Rifath Sharook, an 18-year-old from Tamil Nadu built a satellite that fits into a 4 centimetre cube and weighs 64 grams.
History has been made today as the world's smallest and lightest satellite, named KalamSat was carried by a NASA sounding rocket from Wallops Island, a NASA facility at around 3pm (IST). An experiment of an 18-year-old Indian student is carried out by NASA for the first time.
Rifath Sharook, from Tamil Nadu built this satellite that fits into a 4 centimetre cube and weighs 64 grams. This class 12 student is gearing up to break a global space record by launching his satellite.
Kalamsat was the only Indian payload in the mission.
More about the satellite:
KalamSat is named after the former president and one of India's greatest nuclear scientists Dr APJ Abdul Kalam
It was made using reinforced carbon fiber polymer and weighs lesser than a smartphone's weight
This project by Sharook is the first one to be manufactured via 3D printing and got selected through a competition named 'Cubes in Space', which was sponsored jointly by NASA and 'I Doodle Learning'
The aim of the project is to take the performance of new technology to space
The competition was all about creating an experimental satellite that would fit in a 4 metre cube and also possess an accurate mass of 64 grams, which can be sent to space
According to Sharook, this project would be a sub-orbital flight and after it is launched, the mission span would be 240 minutes. The tiny satellite is supposed to operate for 12 minutes in a micro-gravity environment of space.
"The main role of the satellite would be to demonstrate the performance of 3D-printed carbon fiber", Times of India quoted Sharook as saying. "We did a lot of research on different cube satellites all over the world and found ours was the lightest."
Comments
Post a Comment