Growing up in rural Andhra Pradesh, Murthy Gudipati sometimes slept in fields looking up at the stars. A few decades later, he now studies them as an astrophysicist and planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena. An IISc alumnus from the 1987 batch, he studies the evolution of different kinds of ice […]
What microbes are teaching us about life in space In Andy Weir’s fiction novel The Martian, NASA astronaut Mark Watney is stranded alone on Mars after his crew is forced to evacuate. To survive, he begins growing potatoes in his crew’s Martian habitat. Soon, however, he develops a new priority – ensuring the survival […]
Can it help us understand the unknown universe? One day in the spring of 1543, a canon named Nicolaus Copernicus, lying on his sickbed, suddenly awoke from a coma that he had been put under because of a brain stroke. Resting beside him was the first copy of his magnum opus: De revolutionibus orbium […]
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 […]
