Nation building through ISRO and its Chandrayaan-3

1. Name of the Activity: Nation building through ISRO and its Chandrayaan-3
2. Type of Activity: Invited lecture cum awareness session
3. Date/ Duration of Activity (from-to): 29.04.2024
4. Time: 10 am to 5 pm

5. Details of Resource Persons: Sri Debajyoti Dhar, Outstanding Scientist and Deputy Director and Dr. Jolly Dhar, Group Director of Microwave Sensors Receiver Group both from Space Applications Centre (SAC), ISRO Ahmedabad Centre

6. No. of Participants: 57 Teachers and Staff and 223 Students

7. Objective of the event: To learn about the exemplary leadership of both the resource persons in the Chandrayaan-3 mission that, last year, hit the headlines across global newspapers and welcomed huge praise across countries.

8. Brief description of the event: In the first session, Sri Debojyoti Dhar shared his experience on India’s Moon Mission: Chandrayaan-3 and Computer Vision as AI/ML/DL applications. He explained the Chandrayaan-1 and Chandrayaan-2 missions through the associated instruments and images to create a knowledge base and thereafter, emphasized on the Chandrayaan-3. Different techniques employed for soft landing were explained by him. Some video clips were also presented related to deployment of the Pragyan Rover. In addition to this, he appreciated the fact that all the instruments were designed and fabricated in India highlighting our country’s potential to excel indigenously. He, then, digressed a bit and discussed a deep learning model known as Generative Adversarial Network which is essentially used to recognize wet lands at higher resolution based on missing data reconstruction.

In the second session, Dr. Jolly Dhar, elaborated on the RADAR sensors used at ISRO for civilian and planetary missions. Discussing on the multiple dimensions of ISRO’s space programs, she emphasized that all these aspects are the fruits of labour of the passionate professionals who have gathered from different disciplines to build a nation and scale new heights. She talked about the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and a consequent built up of the Earth Observation Space-borne SAR made in India. Further, she iterated on the collaboration of ISRO with NASA on SAR for natural ecosystems and coastal regions for oceanographic studies. She ended her session talk sharing the roadmap for the futuristic Terahertz technology which is being viewed as the next big thing that ISRO would embark upon.

The third and final session was an interactive round where both the speakers interacted directly with the audience. The students, especially, were inquisitive enough to ask nuanced and thoughtful questions to the resource persons who, with great humour and patience, answered each and every query to the audience’s delight. The speakers talked at great length on the career and job opportunities at ISRO and were so visibly engaged with the audience that they, even, were extracting questions out from the spectators most resistive to questioning.

9. Outcome of the event: 280 participants comprising students, teachers and laboratory staff members of the Science Section of The Bhawanipur Education Society College (BESC) and nearby colleges have spent the entire day listening to the rich experience and expertise of two leading scientists from Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) on the 29th day of April, 2024.