With an aim to provide thrust to space science across the country, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has announced a list of new projects including an incubation centre in Trichy, Tamil Nadu and a space research facility in Kanyakumari.
Addressing reporters in New Delhi, ISRO’s Chairman Dr K Sivan listed the projects which also focussed on leveraging the student community in the country. Stating that students in India have immense potential and that it is ISRO’s responsibility to make use of it, K Sivan announced the Young Scientists program. “Under this program ISRO is announcing that three students from each state and union territory… will be selected to ISRO for the Young Scientists program for one month. Under this program, the selected students, mostly 8th standard passout students, they will be taken to ISRO, they will be given lectures,” he said.
Adding that the students will also be allowed to interact with senior scientists and access research labs, Dr Sivan said, “They will also have access to Research and Development lab also. We want them to get a practical experience of building a small satellite. If the satellites are good, we want them to fly.” He explained that this program was similar to NASA’s student outreach program which brings students to its labs. Dr K Sivan also requested students from all over the country to contact ISRO if they wanted to launch their own satellites and assured that it will be done free of cost.
Explaining ISRO’s decision to spread its wings far and wide across the country, Dr Sivan said that the manpower in the premier organisation is not enough to handle its increasing responsibilities like the Gaganyaan. “We want to take the potential available in India not only in ISRO but also in other parts of the country. To tap their (students’) potential, we are proposing to have six incubation centres across the country. One each in the north, south, east, west, northeast and centre,” he said. Explaining that ISRO will assign problems to the students who can build prototypes of the solutions for those problems, which will be bought by ISRO itself. He also announced that incubation centres at NIT Tripura, NIT Jalandhar have been inaugurated. “Four more incubation centres to come up in Trichy, Nagpur, Rourkela and Indore. Along with it we created an incubation centre at Sambalpur, also one Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Central University, Jammu,” he announced.
Further, in order to make space science and research accessible to talents from all over the country, Dr Sivan said six research centres will also be set up in the same model like incubation centres – one in each direction of the nation. The research centres would be set up in Jaipur, Guwahati University, NIT Kurukshetra, IIT Varanasi, NIT Patna and Dr Sivan’s native town Kanyakumari in Tamil Nadu.