Chief Minister K Palaniswami announced a cash reward of Rs 10 lakh to an Indian student who has developed a 64-gram satellite that was launched by NASA. The name of the satellite is KalamSat, named after former India President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam. And the name of the student is Rifath Sharook. He is a class 12 student from Tamil Nadu’s Pallapatti town. The satellite, which is weighing just 64 grams, was designed by 18-year-old Rifath Sharook along with 6 other team members. The satellite is lighter than a Smartphone and it is made of reinforced carbon fiber polymer. It is operated for 12 minutes in a micro-gravity environment of space after its flight.
Yesterday in a suo moto statement in Assembly, K Palaniswami said Rifath Sharook and his team, will be rewarded “to further encourage”. Sharook and his team brought laurels to India and in particular Tamil Nadu, Rs 10 lakh will be given by the state government to them.
It was a moment of pride for the country’s budding space scientists as the experimental satellite designed by the six-member team led by Md. Rifath Shaarook of Pallapatti in Tamil Nadu was successfully launched into sub-orbital space by SR 4 rocket at around 2 p.m. from Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, United States, on Thursday. Celebrations began in Chennai, just seconds after the launch of KalamSat, which was live streamed on Ustream by an organization for bringing out the talent of students.
The Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu said that the reward was to encourage those students towards making more “achievements.” K Palaniswami said ‘KalamSat,’ launched on 22nd June by NASA, won first prize among more than 80,000 models in a competition held by the USA space agency.
Mr. Sharook is a student hailing from Pallapatti in Karur District of Tamil Nadu. He and his team were aided by ‘Space Kids Indian organization. Space Kids is an organization which is promoting science, art, and culture of our country. According to this Space Kids organization, KalamSat is a 3.8 cm3 satellite of ‘Femto category’. Its structure is fully 3D printed with reinforced carbon fiber material in which they will be using complex carbon fiber.
It is combined with a temperature sensor, humidity sensor, and a barometric pressure sensor. This tiny satellite is world’s lightest satellite which also has a “Nano Geiger-Muller counter”, which will measure the radiation in outer space, it said.
But what he said, who has invented this item? “I don’t have words to express my joy. It is a great moment and it is really a motivating factor and to aspiring student scientists to pursue a career in space research and designing satellites,” said Mr. Rifath Sharook. He also said that the tiny satellite will capture and record temperature, pressure, radiation level, rotation buckling, magnetosphere and other information before landing in the ocean. He also added that he will soon get the data captured by the satellite.
