Sreedhara Panicker Somanath is the 10th Chair of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). He graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from TKM College of Engineering, Kollam, in 1985. Soon after, he started his stint in ISRO as team leader of the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV). After 10 years of service, he […]
Tag: ISRO
‘I had developed an emotional attachment with the Institute’
GD David worked in various departments as an administrative staff for close to four decades. During this period, he was secretary to former Director Satish Dhawan at IISc as well as at the Department of Space. In this interview, he recollects his association with the Institute.
A Martian Odyssey
Ritu Karidhal completed her MTech from the Department of Aerospace Engineering, IISc, in 2003. A senior scientist at the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), she has participated in many of its critical missions, including the recent Chandrayaan-2. As a Deputy Operations Director, Karidhal played a key role in steering the Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), […]
Vikram Sarabhai’s years at IISc
2019 is the birth centenary of Vikram Sarabhai, the founder of India’s space programme, who was born in Ahmedabad on 12 August 1919. Sarabhai, pursuing his studies at Cambridge when WWII broke out, returned to India to work with CV Raman at IISc, where he also met Homi J Bhabha. In these excerpts from her […]
MONTBLEX: India’s First Major Monsoon Experiment
The first national effort to understand the meteorological phenomenon For about four months from May to September 1990, the Indian summer monsoon was the subject of unprecedented nationwide attention. While the monsoon winds raced from Kerala to the northwest of India in 35 days, less than its usual 45, researchers on land, air and sea […]
‘Dhawan introduced a new personality to IISc’: Roddam Narasimha
Roddam Narasimha is the DST Year-of-Science Professor at the Engineering Mechanics Unit, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bangalore. Narasimha, a former professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at IISc, was one of Satish Dhawan’s earliest students. In this excerpt from a wide-ranging interview, he shares his memories of Dhawan. What was […]
How IISc Launched Aerospace Research in India
And how its alumni shaped it in the years that followed IISc set up its Department of Aeronautical Engineering in 1942 – bang in the middle of World War II. It was the year that the Nazis were to begin acting on their horrific plan for a “Final Solution”, that the Japanese military strengthened its […]
Memories of a Bangalore Quartet
Malgudi, RK Narayan’s idyllic setting for his stories, may have been inspired by the Mysore of a bygone era, but its name is a felicitous blend of two of Bangalore’s oldest suburbs – Malleswaram and Basavangudi. Even in the 1970s, when I first arrived in the city, these areas retained an old-worldly charm. Few could […]