“We aspire to hoist the Indian flag on the surface of Moon!”
Nishant Arora, Sourabh Kaushal
It feels great to collaborate with Success Stories and communicate with its intelligent readers. We are Nishant Arora and Sourabh Kaushal, 22 year old aspiring space enthusiasts from Haryana, India. Currently, we are pursuing B.tech in Electronics and Communication from the Institute of Science and Technology, Yamunanagar.
In second semester of B.tech, I and my classmate Sourabh Kaushal came to know about the perils of Space Debris. Since the two of us grew up reading and hearing about Kalpana Chawla and shared interest in Space Science from the early childhood days, we found the topic of Space Debris to be quite interesting and started to access its history and recent growth.
After a couple of days’ research, we came to know about the “Jerome Pearson Award” by International Space Elevator Consortium, ISEC, USA. They called for papers which suggested new mitigation methods of Space Debris. We took an initiative to research about it and propose some new methods. We spent several nights and days researching about this topic and finally proposed some new methods to mitigate Space Debris.
We submitted the abstract of our paper titled “Space Debris, and its Mitigation” for the first round and it was selected. Small appreciation matters a great deal lot! We were quite satisfied to get our abstract selected in an international level competition. We submitted our full paper after the selection of abstract. We were hoping for the best in the competition. When we got the result of “Jerome Pearson Award 2010”, we were not able to believe that our paper stood “Runner-up” in the competition.
It was a moment of pride for us, our parents and our institute. But we took it more as the beginning of our new journey.
This achievement boosted up our morale and confidence to a great extent and we submitted our next paper titled “Space Elevator: Dilemma and Remedies”, which was selected for presentation in “Space Elevator Conference 2010” held at Microsoft Conference Centre, Redmond, Washington, USA. We presented our paper in the conference and we were quite happy to know that some esteemed scientists like Dr. Jerome Pearson and Dr. Yuri Artsutanov were also present there.
We presented another paper on Space Elevator in “Euorospaceward Conference 2010” which was held at Luxembourg, Europe. After this achievement our paper titled “Space Debris: A Growing Issue” got selected for the presentation in “ISTS 2011” which was held at Okinawa, Japan. We laid stress on the use of nanotechnology in mitigation of Space Debris. We also proposed to use Space Debris to create energy. We are presently working with an official team of “Google Lunar X Prize” which is a great platform for us to show our talent. Moreover, the team’s name is “Team Indus” which is the only team from India in the competition. So we want to work hard for Team Indus to show India’s potential to the world.
We have received Dr. Kalpana Chawla Young Scientist Award for our innovative research work on Space Debris Mitigation.
Our research paper got selected for IEEE ESTEL Conference 2012(ITALY), COSPAR Scientific Assemby (Mysore), invited as Guest Speaker at EUSPEC, GERMANY.
Recently, we have founded a group named “Space Techos” whose aim is to spread more and more awareness about space science in common people. We invite each and every person interested in space science to our group. We want to show the hidden talents in our society to the world.
Our journey from general B.tech students to Space Techos has been quite interesting and memorable and we want to continue it till our last breath.
