BENGALURU: The Indian Technology Congress Association (ITCA) and Israel Space Agency are working together to facilitate the launch of 75 nano satellites by August 2022. These will be built by students from colleges and schools across India. The purpose is to make satellite building affordable and change the mindset that the expertise requires only scientists to do it. They announced their plan at the inauguration of Indian Technology Congress 2019, with the theme ‘ Human Digitalization: Future Intelligence’.
Muralikrishna Reddy, ITCA president, told TNIE that 27 teams have come forward from all over the country. “We have little participation from Karnataka but there is still time as we intend to launch at least 75 satellites before our 75th Independence Day in August 2022. Two teams, including members of the college management, visited Israel to get an idea of their best practices. India had 9 to 10 such launches earlier by students which were unsuccessful but since high school students of Israel have been successful in this, we are partnering with them.
They will provide us with technical expertise and financial support to educational institutions. Each college will also get trained for 10-15 days.”Eight years ago, Israel came up with a programme to get students between 14 and 18 years, to launch nano satellites into the orbit with the help of academia and industry. The project in India is based on this model.
Meir Ariel, director of The Herzliya Science Center, a high school, said, “The satellites launched by Israeli students were used for search and rescue operations. We made an offer to India to make a constellation of nano satellites with ISRO helping with the launch vehicle.”
Professor Chaim Eshed, scientific advisor, Tel Aviv University, said, “The idea is to make an ecosystem where there is flow of information between universities, schools and engineers. I was looking for Phds to launch satellites 40 years ago, but now kids are doing it.” Ariel said one satellite would cost anywhere between half a million to one million US dollars.
“The project is not simple. It will make this affordable and children will use artificial intelligence, quantum computers to launch 75 satellites into the low earth orbit,” Ariel added. It takes nearly 2.5 years to build one nano satellite.