Lightest satellite invented by eighteen-year-old to be launched by NASA

Making India proud at the international level, an invention of a young scientist of world’s lightest satellite will be launched from Wallops Island, a NASA facility. This will be the first time an Indian student's experiment will be flown by NASA. Hailing to a unknown town of Pallapatti in Tamil Nadu, eighteen-year-old Rifath Sharook is set to break a global space record. As per a report published in The Times of India, Rifath said it will be a sub-orbital flight and post-launch, the mission span will be 240 minutes and the tiny satellite will operate for 12 minutes in a micro-gravity environment of space. “The main role of the satellite will be to demonstrate the performance of 3-D printed carbon fibre,” he explained. The satellite was selected through a competition called 'Cubes in Space', jointly organised by NASA and organisation called 'I Doodle Learning'. For Sharook, the main challenge was to design an experiment to be flown to space which will fit into a four-metre cube weighing exactly 64 grams. "We did a lot of research on different cube satellites all over the world and found ours was the lightest," he said. Rifath informed that the satellite is made mainly of reinforced carbon fibre polymer. "We obtained some of the components from abroad and some are indigenous," he said.