Good afternoon, dear friends and colleagues. It's my great pleasure and honor to welcome all of you for today's function, the VGK Memorial Lecture. And let me begin by welcoming speaker Dr. Kasturi Rangan. Very fortunate to have him. He readily agreed to this invitation. And thank you very much, sir, and warm welcome to you. I'm also very happy to welcome members of VG Kulkarni's family who are present with us on this occasion every year. It's a kind of family gathering for us, a very special day, a very warm welcome to you. It's wonderful to have you back with us every year. I see many former colleagues, people associated with the center in various capacities. Welcome to all of you, and my colleagues as well. Let me begin by saying a few words, as we usually do on this occasion, about a former director, founder director, VG Kulkarni, who is a scientist from TIFR. It's the day when we remember VGK and the reasons and its motivation for founding a center of this kind, which is somewhat unique in the Indian landscape. And we renew our commitment to the goals of our institution. So VG Kulkarni, born 1932, began his career in 1953 at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai. At the peak of his career as a solid state and nuclear physicist, he decided to devote himself to the cause of science education in the country. Under the guidance of Professor B.M. Udgaonkar, he founded and nurtured the Homibaba Center for Science Education, and he was its director from 1974 until his retirement in 1994. During his distinguished career as a scientist and educationist, VG Kulkarni was connected with several educational institutions and organizations, and was a recipient of many honors and awards, including the Dr. Govardhan Das Parik Award in 1985. With his students and colleagues, he undertook many significant research projects, especially for improvement of science and mathematics education of children from disadvantaged sections of the society. In fact, the center began with a major project, an intervention with the Bombay Municipal Corporation Schools, and subsequently with several schools, government schools, located in rural areas of Maharashtra, the ashram schools in Maharashtra, and so on. So I'll say a little bit about this later. The place of language and education was a major focal point of his research in science education. He wrote extensively, simply and convincingly, in Marathi and English, on science and the need for a scientific culture in society. A lover of books, he was a brilliant orator, known for his scholarship, mastery of words, and a refreshing sense of humor. VG Kulkarni expired on July 13, 2002. As a tribute to him, HPCSE has instituted a series of annual memorial lectures, which began in 2002. So today is the 17th lecture. These lectures, given by eminent scientists and educationists, deal with central issues in science, technology, education, and society. I'll say a little bit more about our founder, especially something about his values and commitments. Firstly, he was a person committed to science. In a true sense, science has a free, creative enterprise of inquiry, which keeps a broad and open mind free from biases, and which meant that science education was at the very center of that vision of science. And that was his commitment to take science to the masses and to begin a program with the underprivileged sections in Bombay City and to found the center. Another commitment of VG Kulkarni's that we recall today is his commitment to the nation and to nation building. As Sri Varun Sani, who spoke from this podium a few days ago, reminded us, the true meaning of nation is not something abstract, something in stone, or in metaphors, and so on, but it's the people. So the nation is nothing but the people of India. And it was to that idea of nation and to that vision of nation building that VG Kulkarni was committed. So he wanted the people of India, those who make up its nation, to advance, to come, to make progress. And again, he saw education as the means to that and science education. Finally, I must just mention that VG Kulkarni had a very broad sensibility. He was hospitable to many streams and perspectives of thought. He collaborated with social scientists. In fact, the Tata Institute of Social Science nearby was an active institution for collaboration. And those links continue even today. So this broad catholicity we also try to reflect in the programs at the center. We take some pride in saying that we are a place where there's interdisciplinary work and perspectives from both science and social science, which are necessary for education of brought together in our work. So today we renew our commitment to those goals and to those values and those priorities. I would like all of us to participate in honoring VGK's memory and also by honoring Mrs. VG Kulkarni, who is present here today. I request Professor Sandeep Trivedi to give her a flower bouquet. Thank you, Professor Trivedi. Very happy to have all of them, Mrs. Kulkarni. VGK's daughter, son-in-law, VGK's both sons, daughter-in-law, all of them are present today. Wonderful to have you with us and hope this association continues year after year. I'll say a little bit about speaker today, Dr. Kasuri Rangan, who needs no introduction, is an eminent space scientist, headed the space program for many years. And has many other accomplishments to his credit. We're very happy to have you in our midst today, sir. And you know some of you that he's very closely associated with the central goal of the institution, namely education. He's now heading a committee, which is formulating a vision and a policy for education for the country in the years to come. The 17th VGK Memorial Lecture will be delivered by eminent space scientist Dr. K. Kasuri Rangan. Dr. Kasuri Rangan is currently the chair of the Committee for National Education Policy. He's also chancellor, Central University of Rajasthan, and chair, Public Affairs Center of Bangalore. He's chair of the Karnataka Knowledge Commission and a member of the Atomic Energy Commission. He's emeritus professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, NEAS, and Bangalore, and an honorary distinguished scientific advisor of the Indian Space Research Organization, ISRO. Earlier as chairman of ISRO, he oversaw the space program of India between the years 1994 and 2003. He was a member of the Rajasabha 2003 to 2009, and concurrently the director of NEAS, Bangalore, and subsequently a member of the Astwal Planning Commission. His interests include astrophysics, space science, and technology, as well as science-related policies. Dr. Kasuri Rangan is a member of several international and national science academies, and has won many distinguished awards for his professional achievements, including the Shanti Swaroop Bhatnagar Award in engineering. The Allen D. Emil Memorial Award of the International Astronautical Federation 2004, the Theodor von Karman Award by International Academy of Astronautics 2007, and the Lifetime Achievement Award of Asia-Pacific Satellite Communications Council, Singapore, among others. He's been conferred with the highest civilian honors, Padma Sri, Padma Bhushan, and Padma Vibhushan by the President of India, and the award of the Officer of the Légion Dhyonar by the President of the French Republic, France. We're very privileged to have you here, and I must mention that Dr. Kasuri Rangan readily agreed to our invitation. There was absolutely no back and forth, and we're very grateful to him for agreeing to come here. Before we begin, I'd request Professor Trivedi to greet Dr. Kasuri Rangan with flowers, and also to say a few words. Good evening to you all, dear friends. Dr. Kasuri Rangan, Dr. Karkotkar, respected family members of Sri Kulkarni, and all my dear colleagues and friends, I won't take up very much of your time. I just wanted to say this is a very special occasion, as Ravi said, for all of us to gather and remember a real inspiration to us all, Sri Kulkarni, and to think about all that he contributed to TIFR and the country, and so I'm very happy myself to be here. I also take this opportunity to welcome actually two very respected and senior people in the science community, Dr. Kasuri Rangan and Dr. Karkotkar here in our midst. I'm very thankful to Dr. Kasuri Rangan for sparing the time to come and deliver this lecture. We look forward to your thoughts and to this title, which is we know you've been so closely associated with the space program, so it's a real privilege to be able to hear from you. And I also thank Dr. Karkotkar for sparing the time to be here in our midst this afternoon. I should say to you all that both Dr. Karkotkar and Dr. Kasuri Rangan have played a very important role in guiding TIFR. Dr. Kasuri Rangan is currently on the Council of Management of TIFR for several years, and I can tell you, since it's been my privilege to be with him on the council, that his role there has been absolutely pivotal in guiding the institution and guiding me personally. And so thank you for that as well. I take this opportunity to thank you. And also, Dr. Karkotkar, for many years, as you know, was Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and on TIFR's Council. And again, we benefited enormously and continue to benefit from his guidance. So thank you too for that. So with that, I hand it over to you. Just a quick reminder that we are also live streaming this talk. And if any of you would like to communicate to your friends, it's on live stream on the HBCSETFR Facebook page, which is the official Facebook page. So you can direct any of your friends to that, and it will be on there. The lecture will also be available afterwards on HBCSETFR's YouTube channel. I welcome Dr. Kassir Rangan to give that talk. Dr. Subramaniam, my dear, long-term colleague and friend, Dr. Karkotkar, Sandeep, Professor Sandeep Thruvedi, members of the Professor Viji Kulkarni family, other distinguished invitees, students, ladies and gentlemen. At the outset, let me express my grateful thanks to Professor Subramaniam for inviting me to deliver this annual feature, the Professor Viji Kulkarni Memorial Lecture. Of course, he said that I readily agreed. But there are names and institutions in this country which have come into being with a purpose, which has, in many ways, not only justified their existence, but far outperformed their expectations, unique in nature, coming out of out-of-box and innovative thinking, and contributing significantly to one of the most important endeavor of this country, the education. I don't think that we have to put these criteria and ask a name of an institution that comes to your mind. This is the institution that one talks of. So there is no question. There is no apology from anybody with respect to accepting an invitation from you, Professor Subramaniam, on this occasion. I'm extremely happy that my friend, Professor Kulkarni is here with us today. You know, when I say his friend and colleague and all that, it may should not be looking platitudinous. We have been together when he was the chairman of Atomic Energy Commission. I was the chairman of the Space Commission. We had a very long stint together, coordinating, working together. And in fact, I should say, he opened up several aspects of atomic energy program, which was an eye-opener to me. In fact, the first time the space started really seriously looking at working together with atomic energy. It was his initiative, whether it is related to the computer development, whether it is related to simulation, whether it was material development, solar energy systems, radioisotope system. I remember many of these wide number of things in which we wanted to work together. We had our ambitions to work together. And I'm sure that it continues today, but it was a very unique experience to have worked with him. But the thing didn't stop there. When I went to the Rajya Sabha, he was grappling with the nuclear deal. And it was my habit to call him up too often. Sometimes, probably, it should have even irritated him to the extent of trying to get clarifications from him. And it was an extraordinary period for the atomic energy program. And he was really at the hem of affairs at that particular point. And I, as a representative in the parliament, used to articulate whatever. Now I can say this, articulate whatever he wanted. So that is the amount of immoluency he had with me, with respect to this. And so on the ultimate talk, which I gave on the innate 230, it was almost 29 minutes I got to speak. We like nominated members can speak not more than five to six minutes in Rajya Sabha. And that day, I got 29 minutes simply because of the fact that I was echoing the view with the contrast thought it is theirs. It was echoing my view and that of atomic energy and that of Dr. Kakodkar. So I mentioned it in the lecture that it is people like Dr. Kakodkar that has made this possible. So I very much remember this. And of course, we continue to associate ourselves even now. So the question of being a colleague and a long-term friend, I think is even contemporary and currently also valid. That is the value that I attached to my association with Dr. Kakodkar. So when I asked him, oh, you could find time to come here. He said, what do you talk about like this? Why are you talking like this? That is the kind of person he is. I'm extremely happy that I am here on this day, the day to remember. And I understand this also happens to be the birthday of Professor Kulkarni. So what a privilege to be talking on this day. On a subject, the subject is on space. When you invited me, I thought that I should be speaking on the India's policy on education. And I thought by the time the data arrives, things will be cleared so that we can immediately talk about it without any kind of inhibitions. But that was not the way. And still the report has to be submitted. There are the further presentations and further procedures that we have to complete before we can consider that the report is final and accepted. And until that, it would be difficult for me to speak about it even though most of it is all in place. So I'm sorry that I could not really take advantage of this invitation to talk for the first time in this institute about India's education policy because of the constraints of schedules and certain other formalities to be completed. But nevertheless, I thought that I should choose a subject. I went through all the list of people who have talked to the very eminent people, extraordinary topics they have touched upon. But one thing I found that there was a gap. There was no mention of anywhere, a presentation on the space program. I thought, and that is of course right now being discussed quite a lot in the newspapers and other places. So I thought this is the right time for me to say a few words about India's space program. Not only with respect to what is happening presently, but also a little bit about the past because that is very important for our program simply because of the fact that we laid the type of groundwork that was laid by the pioneers of India's space program certainly has its impact on the sustainability that one is witnessing of this activity today. And also the type of planning that we are trying to do for the future. So keeping this mind and also my own comfort in dealing with the subject, I thought I should use this opportunity to speak on the India space. I will start with the initial developments that happen as a part of the space program elsewhere. You know this, one really looks back at the history of the space exploration. It could be right back to something like 1947, 1948 kind of period when the first of the balloons and the rockets were flown. And the whole idea was to carry instrument to the fringes of the atmosphere about 100 kilometers. So that is a rough definition of where the atmosphere ends and the space begins. So that is roughly the period. That is the period 1947 when this activity started. The idea was to understand a little bit on the geophysical aspects of the earth to look at the sun as an object to be studied because it is the closest star and also certain other astronomical observations which are not amenable to be seen from the ground. So keeping these in mind, the early exploration using balloons and rockets and has been one of the key elements of starting the program in the way in which we understand the space today. Of course, when the first of the satellite was orbited, the Sputnik, October 4, 1947, 1957, and also closely followed by the United States then by 1958, they flew their own satellite. It was thought that here is a new era as the first vantage point of space is being opened up for looking at areas which have been beyond the earth's vicinity and therefore opens up very many possibilities. In this context, these were the area times of Cold War and the interest of the United States which was immediately interpreted and that too of the then Soviet Union that they wanted to establish the regal principle that the altitudes that with the satellite's orbit are beyond the national regimes of any country and therefore you are free to fly there, do what you want there and it doesn't come under any kind of illegal constraint. So that was understood and considering that it was a Cold War era, this fitted well with the other objective that of snooping into the territory of your adversary with satellite-bound camera systems. And so in a sense this was one of the key driver of the early part of the space program which was an extension into space of the Cold War era between the United States and then Soviet Union. But at the same time, of course there were, one was not losing sight of the fact that there were very interesting possibilities of looking at the atmospheric regime, the atmospheric regime and the space regime beyond and the interplanetary medium that a possibility access to the space really opens up. So, but then so there was this dual purpose, the Cold War era and the advantages of flying satellites in a regime where the legal principles of international legal principles do not apply. And on the other side, the very potential ways in which the exploration can be further extended with very interesting possibilities on the scientific front. On the other side, if you really look at the Indian perspective and this I should say started with something like in 1963 when the first of the rockets were flown from India, our idea was that it has to have, it will have this vantage point of space. Once it is opened up, once we able to master this particular vantage point, we can have objectives which are one of course scientific that everybody understands and the socio-economic objectives. In fact, only two countries in the world at the time really had the peaceful objectives, the India and Japan in terms of exploiting the space for purposes which are beyond the military. So that's why I put it as scientific and economic objectives here and that is how it started, it's not coming up. Can somebody help me to, it's not moving, okay, thank you. So how does the story begin? So far as India is concerned, the first of the rockets were launched from the Tumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station. Why Tumba was chosen is one question that one can ask. This is one of the location, a location, a geographic location on one side but more importantly, a geomagnetic location where the geomagnetic equator, you know the Earth's geographic equator is there. There is also a geomagnetic equator if you consider the Earth as a dipole magnet and then if you try to put the latitude, longitude around that kind of a dipole magnet, then the equatorial aspect, part of it goes through Tumba. So it really triggers this presence of an equatorial, the geomagnetic equator over Tumba triggers a variety of phenomena, especially in the regions of the atmosphere which you called as the ionized or ionosphere. So that was actually one of the motivations of starting the India Space Program because we had this interesting geophysical resource. Sarabha, the India Space Pioneer, I show him his photograph here, said about this, starting this, he was the pioneer, he thought about what India can do and we'll see a little bit of his own vision about this. But the most important thing is he started this, there were as usual many questions of why are we going to splurge our money into this kind of an activity. And that to find one of the speeches around the time 1963, 1963, 1964, 65, he said this while addressing the United Nations on the justification for a developing country, at that time a developing country like India. There are some who question the relevance of space activities in a developing nation. We were to play a meaningful role nationally and in the committee of nations, we must be second to none in the application of advanced technologies to the real problems of man and the society. So that was his justification in a very, very simplistic as well as in a abbreviated way. But what he knew is that whereas science can drive the initial part of the program, one can exploit the questions or the ideas related to the scientific problems of the geomagnetic equator and above in the atmosphere. And also one can look at the southern sky from Tumba which you cannot see in the northern part of the world and therefore you can have a good feel of the astronomical objects in the southern sky. There is another kind of a thing you can do by flying rockets in Tumba. He knew ultimately these kind of justification cannot sustain itself until we have a strong socioeconomic front to this. And so he knew that there are many possibilities with respect to tangible social benefits that such a space program can bring. There were questions of telecommunications, connectivity between different locations of the country, timely accurate and precise information about natural resources, strengthening the agricultural system by looking at the materiality and the ability for the synoptic view from space of looking at the materialical phenomena. So there were many socioeconomic objectives that he first saw in the vantage point of space. So he knew that. Of course there were many intangible. There were the technological capability and intangible objective could be made economic beyond the socioeconomic part of it. The leadership which it can create in the context of carrying out an objective in space. You have several aspects of institutions and groups coming together. So there is a question of a leadership that which is needed specifically for this kind of activity. And then multiple institutions and self. Then the most important thing he knew also knew that ultimately because you knew people also knew that it is a extension of the military objectives in the case of Soviet Union. And it will have also a long-term military and a strategic objective. So self-reliance is extremely bought and otherwise at the most critical moment India could be denied of technology. India could be denied of a certain critical capability which could even affect its socioeconomic development. So these were the kind of things that he had in mind. So he really drew up an exceptional vision keeping this aspect of it. So the program is started in 1963 with the launch of the surrounding rocket to look at the upper atmosphere has now grown, evolved in several dimensions. And today nearly 55 years after the first rocket was fired if you really look at what have we done in the last 55 years you can just give you some feel of it in this particular slide which is that we had something like we developed our own launch vehicles and today we are very often about the polar satellite launch vehicle, the vehicle which is able to push multi-tank satellites in the near earth orbits and also geosynchronous missions and so on. We had something like 67 launch vehicle missions until recently over the last 55 years and we had a fairly high success rate. And this I should say especially considering the fact that space has got a risk element but over the years after the initial setback that we had with respect to the smaller vehicles called the satellite launch vehicle SLV3 or the ASLV. The PSLV and beyond we have been having a remarkable set of successors because we have tried to understand and overcome many of the earlier issues of bottlenecks that we had to meet in the launch vehicle development. So today we have one of the finest records in terms of launching successfully satellites. The budget we started few crores in 1960s. Today has become 1.4 billion in the annual budget of the space and we have a very high level of application leaders. I want to talk about application because that is the one that really sustains and justifies the space program and I mentioned about the vision of Sarabha of the socioeconomic development. Here is this very specific example of the application leadership that we have been see some of the applications. The use of space by stakeholders outside ISRO with respect to their own requirements of a certain type of goals. Then of course we have also grown over the years the industry which is very extremely important because we knew that space by itself cannot do all the things that it is expected to do unless you have partnership in industry. There are something like 500 industries they work together with ISRO today. 500 small industries about 70, 80 medium industries and about 15 big industries. So they all come together in supporting India Space Program. One of the hallmarks of the space program has been the international collaboration. The space certainly is a strategic aspect but India's political equations and the early association with some of the countries like Soviet Union, United States, Japan, Germany and so on certainly has now today grown into something like collaboration with 30 or 35 countries with whom we work on various types of program whether it is related to the technology, development of satellites, supply of satellites, use of satellites and so on and so forth. And in the process we also have launched something like 97 satellites with our vehicle and of course another 237. Of course these are smaller satellites. You know there was one single shot in which 104 satellites were launched into the orbit. So that is the kind of a thing that we have been also able to do in trying to provide support to international space activities. I'm sorry, something is... Where is it coming back again? Okay. Yeah, that's okay. And then of course, self-reliance, I said, state of heart, human resources. Today we have something like 18,000 people who work within ISRO and an equal number who work in the industries and in other institutions. Space commerce is taking over slowly in the context of our ability to share the capabilities with other institutions and other countries and also provide it at a cost. So you have a commerce element which need to be grown further in the coming years and large user base. The most important thing I said is the justification of the space activity because of the presence of a large user base in the country, both governmental as well as non-governmental system. And in all these, we have built up both within the organization and outside the organization a fairly large infrastructure which together represent an end-to-end capability. So what are the kind of things that currently we are involved? If you really ask me at this stage, we have five major programs of ISRO. One is, of course, those related to the use of satellites for communication, broadcasting, and navigation. The second is to look at from the vantage point of space the ground and look at the various features of the ground, the resources on the ground, the various types of land applications which you call as remote sensing. Then space transportation, I said that we need to have a cell for alliance in the context of ability to place the satellite at the appropriate orbits. And we had to develop our own launch vehicle for that and we have reasonably well now covered good ground in terms of the PSLV, the PSLV, the GSLV and also the advanced versions of the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicles. And of course the most important aspect is the utilization of some of these things in the context of tangible applications on the ground whether it is in communication, broadcasting, navigation, or remote sensing. And also a fairly good scientific support in terms of scientists coming forward to use the space for areas of astronomy, aeronomy, atmospheric sciences, solar physics and things of that kind. I may also add since this particular side was made and the Prime Minister made a major announcement in the last Independence Day and that is the question of India going in the human space flight. And this he has given a very, very challenging schedule for the human space flight and this is now added as one of the key and major program so far as the space is concerned. I will say a little bit about it as we move further. This is the picture of an Indian remote sensing satellite. The way I want to say a little bit about the Indian remote sensing satellite is you will see that we started with a very limited capability in this at the time when there were two major space powers who built the most sophisticated remote sensing satellites the Americans as well as the French. They built the satellites with, has got something like a resolution which means if you put a camera in the space which is about at 900 kilometers to 1000 kilometers and take the pictures you can get features on the pictures features on the picture which can be as fine as between 20 meters to 30 meters and over a area which could be something like 200 kilometers. So that is a kind of a perspective view with the details that you look for on the land. So that is what it is this kind of a thing. It needed a tremendous amount of new technologies that we brought to bear. And when we try to really look at the technologies that you need for this they were simply not available. I'll give one example of the type of technology that goes into a satellite like the IRS which is what you call as a dry tuned gyroscope. The gyroscope is an inertial sensor and it goes in a high speed and therefore like a top it maintains a certain spinning axis orientation and any disturbance in that particular thing it can be detected, it can be corrected and this principle can be used to create a reference with respect to certain pointing requirements. And then similarly there are many other landmarks in space infrared horizon of the earth or stellar references over the suns reference and so on and so forth. So these kind of things are fairly sophisticated electro optical, electromechanical and mechanical systems like gyroscopes. And these are celestly guarded technologies because it so happens the gyroscopes are also a part of an inertial navigation system which can guide a missile from point A to point B and then also used in aircrafts things like Boeing 747 or 777 they carry the carousel navigation system which also uses similar kind of gyroscopes. So they are simply not available they had to be built from the scratch they were to be learned from textbook principles. So these kind of things were the kind of technology that we had to master. We had to also make sure that the camera systems have to be ultimately of the capability that we have the best in the world. But at the same time we had a satellite which has to be put into a PSLV class of a vehicle which could accommodate only smaller volumes, smaller weights and therefore they had to be compacted. We came out with something which was incredibly new and innovative in terms of camera system the optics particularly. And in fact somebody from Tata Institute George Joseph was one of the key persons in the development of camera systems in its role in those years. So these kind of things. So these are all the kind of challenges we met in the initial stages and optical sensors were built. Later on microwave sensors were built. The difference between optical and microwave is because of the fact that optical really uses the reflected right from the ground to capture the picture. Whereas if you use microwave it's an active system so it uses its own radiation and so you don't have the problem of cloudiness and other kinds of things or day night effects and so on. And then also you use infrared systems where you can get the temperature part of it and therefore you look at the health of the vegetation and things of that kind. So there are all these areas of wavelengths, domains and the visible, the infrared, middle infrared, thermal infrared, the microwave. These have been all now mastered by ISRO in trying to develop the Indian remote sensing satellite series. So how do, how it has grown? We started with the first of the satellite was about one kilometer resolution in Bhaskara. Then we went to the IRS and when we built the first of the IRS series we came nearly to the level of Americans and French. I want to say this because in a period of eight to nine years we built a capability in remote sensing which became comparable to the best in the world which was the IRS 1A and 1B. Then we took up a challenge that they have to be better than even the best in the world and that is the IRS 1C and 1D with 23 meters, five meters and things of that kind. And since then there has been no stopping us. We have been all through going through one meter systems, five, the submeter systems. We have been building systems with radar systems. We have been dealing with the hypersets, spectral sensors, very high resolution in wavelength to look at mineralogy and things of that kind. So there's a whole class of remote sensing capabilities today, India possesses. And in the process it has a constellation of satellites covering these kind of spatial, spectral, temporal resolutions which puts it at the best in the civilian world of satellite remote sensing. I want to say this with pride because of the fact all this happened in the matter of 20 to 25 years. I would like to now show this with some of the pictures. This is the South Bombay. So you can see this is a five meter resolution from one of the Indian satellites. The other one is a one meter resolution again taken by another of the Indian satellites. This is in the Olympic China, it's an airport and you can see the details that you can see at the airport. And even the more details you can see lower side but you can look at an aircraft and look at the two engines, there's a twin-engine aircraft or this thing all from 900 kilometers. So that is a kind of today the capability the country has when you talk of satellite imaging and the satellite remote sensing. This is another thing just to give you a feel. It's a less of a five meter resolution but you can see how beautiful it captures. The Middle East, Palm Damera, I think it's in the Middle East with our IRS, one of the remote sensing satellites. Now what is it used for really? Now today we use it for a variety of applications. I won't go into the details of this but I can say that we use it for agricultural production. What we try to do is to look at the crop gold cycle with satellite because there is a repeativity that is possible. The it has a wavelength range which is appropriate for looking at the crop growth and the corresponding spectral variations in it and it can also look at a fairly large area. So this is a very unique capability to look at agricultural growth, agricultural the maturity and before you go into the harvesting you can have a reasonably good prediction of what the yield is going to be. So one of the key elements of India's capability is the area of production and production and prediction of agricultural yield at least in some eight or nine major crops like wheat, rice, sugar and so on and so forth. So that is one aspect of it in which today we have an operational capability. It is also passed on to the Ministry of Agriculture and it also is the major source of information with respect to the Bureau of Economics and Statistics who get this to the accuracy that they are looking for 95% acquisition and 95% accuracy. So that is the kind of thing of course it does a lot of other things, watershed development, production estimation, property acreage and so on and so forth. I won't go into the details. So similarly in the environment you have forest cover estimation, forest menstruation and look at it. In fact, every two years we place in the parliament the state of health of forest of India how much of forest is getting denuded, what is the forestation strategy and things of that kind. And also now we do the biodiversity so you can look at the various types of flora and fauna up to a certain landscape, first level landscape. Identification so that is another possibility. Coastal region, we have the potential fishery zones. In fact, fishermen today routinely use satellite information in trying to locate the potential schools of fishing. The satellite information here is nothing but I mentioned about the high spectral resolution. So you can look at the phytoplankton, the ocean. This phytoplankton distribution is the fodder to the fish and also that along with the temperature to which the species is very sensitive, the temperature of the ocean. We try to create maps and these maps are used to guide where exactly the potential schools of fishing is there. So you don't have to have a surf space and you produce a valuable time, you reduce the time for search to a minimum level using this kind of a thing. So there is another kind of a thing. Coastal zone mapping, land and water, hydrogeomorphological map, the identification of the groundwater and how do you try to increase the probability of hitting water in the groundwater by using the hydrogeomorphological map that you make out of the satellite pictures. These are many of the applications. I just wanted to give you a little fee of the type of societal relevance today of the Indian remote sensing satellite capability. Now I go to the other area which is the communication, broadcasting and satellite. Of course, communication was one of the early applications to which it was recognized. Araba recognized the importance of this with respect to improving the country's connectivity. We have today three types of communication configuration, a configuration which allows you to have communication and broadcasting. The second one is a multi-mission. Here the advantage is that you try to put three instruments, communication payload, broadcasting payload and a payload for taking the pictures of the meteorological phenomena. Meteorological phenomena are typically continental in terms of looking at the various features of meteorological. So we have this kind of very high resolution radiometers which can take the picture, for example, from Horn of Africa to the west coast of Australia. So you can get a single picture in the national satellite where you can get the entire development of a meteorological phenomena with that kind of a perspective. And then, of course, the satellite navigation which is now a successor to the Navistar system or the Glowna system of Soviet Russia and more recently Galileo of Europe. We are also going for a regional navigation system where it's the third configuration of a communication satellite that we have. And so these are the three types of communication systems which we build regularly. These have typically a lifetime of 12 years. We have to place it in a geosynchronous orbit or in a highly elliptical orbit as is the case with navigation. And from the geosynchronous orbit it acts as a tall tower that 36,000 kilometers so that you can have a point-to-point connection, point-to-multipoint connection or a multi-point-to-multipoint. So you have got all kinds of possibilities in terms of connectivity using satellite. And of course, we are all familiar with it when we talk of a satellite-based communication system for improving telephony, telephone broadcasting and things of that kind. These are some of the most important applications to which it has been used over the years. The television, telephony, I don't have to go into the details of the societal. Telehealth and teleeducation also we have experimented with it. How do you make sure that you have the necessary support of a healthcare system at the rural doorstep with the best of the medical informality that is available in the urban area? So that's kind of a thing which is the tele... And similar thing with respect to teleeducation. Then you have the mobile satellite service. And since I said that we have also in such communication system geosynchronous missions, also instruments for weather and climate that is another major support that it gives. And ultimately, of course, communication system, the weather system and the remote sensing system together can for what you call as a disaster is an important component of what you call as a disaster management. You can look at the emergency communication, disaster warning system. I will see, you will see some of those in the actual pictures. This is of course the teleeducation. There are something like 60,000 classrooms, virtual classrooms connected via satellite to the one location where you have a teacher and with whom the students in different classrooms can interact all across the country. So this kind of a thing is already been promoted about 60,000 classrooms are working in the JUSET network. On the other side, you have also the speciality hospital which provides you the telemedicine. 66 speciality hospitals in major countries connected to something like 300 hospitals at rural and rural. So this is the connectivity between the urban and the rural area to provide the best of the medical knowledge in the urban area into the rural thing. And also they have put through the satellite connectivity, things like 17 mobile telemedicine, telemedicine unit. This is the various aspects of a disaster management support services that the space systems have been able to provide nowadays. Cyclone tracking and landfall, this is, you can virtually see the cyclone moving towards the coast and where exactly and within 50 kilometers today, there is a possibility of locating the landfall where it will hit the cyclone will hit. Flood management, you can really look at the water flow characteristics where you have to put bund and so on. So you have a whole host of quick information system centered around the geographic information system in trying to understand the level of flooding, the level of damage, and also the type of damage items which have been damaged. So you have a flood management input that is available on that. Similarly, you have also for drought monitoring and assessment, you use pictures, remote sensing pictures which has got the infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum which can identify the level of water stress that the plants have. So you have a means of doing a drought monitoring and you can virtually do this every week to get the growth of a drought and you can create what is called as a drought bulletins with the state governments and the central government can use to look at what corrective steps they have to take if you want to get over some of these problems. Many of them are amenable for early actions. Forest fire alerts, landslides, databases, and international commitments are some of the other things that disaster management support service of which the space system today play a key role. You can just see a type of picture that inside a shot of the Phalene cyclone. This is of course an earlier picture, October 2013, but you can see the details that you can get including the eye of the cyclone, very clearly visible. So these kind of things are virtually taken every half an hour or you can even take it every 15 minutes. See the tracking of the movement of the cyclonic condition and you can also use with the simulation in the meteorological systems to identify which is the most possible location for a landfall and therefore you can take a sufficiently early preemptive steps to reduce the loss both of lives and property. So that's the kind of a thing that one is talking about. I come to the third element of the space program, the space science. If you really look at India's space-related activity, it has got virtually every platform that is possible is used. Ground-based systems, you have got radio astronomy, telescope of TIFR is a classic example and then optical telescope, you can see it in Udaipur. Then you have got balloon bond systems, again TIFR has developed balloon bond systems to look at in the higher altitudes, maybe 30, 40 kilometers kind of a thing both for astronomy as well as for atmospheric sciences and then you talk of rockets, you can go up to areas like that because one of the important thing about going for higher altitudes is the fact that we are really talking of overcoming the blanketing effect of the atmosphere and therefore what you cannot see on the ground which is mainly x-rays ultraviolet certain parts, they are infrared part of the spectrum, microwaves, then gamma rays and higher energy x-rays, these are areas which cannot be got from the ground simply because of the absorption of the atmosphere. So as you go up, then this blanketing effect reduces further and further and so more and more astronomy regimes open up, so you have the gamma rays, x-rays and things of that kind. So today India has got all the important platforms whether it is from the ground-based system, balloon-based system, rocket-based system, satellite-based system and conduct a variety of space science experiments which would be related to astronomy and astrophysics, planetary atmospheres and aeronomy, as sciences and solar system studies and of course simulation, modeling, theoretical studies and so on and so forth. And because of this entire gamut of capabilities covering different regimes in terms of the altitudes in which you can deploy the instruments, we have been also part of very important international programs like the International Geosphere, Biosphere program, International Middle Atmosphere program, ISTEP, Indo-X, they try to look at the forcing functions in the atmosphere with respect to aerosol dominated forcing functions. So that kind of a thing. I come in this process to some of the more recent initiatives that ISRO has taken in the conduct of space science and what one can see here is of course, we have Chandrayaan which was flown in 2008 that was the first major planetary mission which ISRO undertook. We had something like 11 instruments to look at the various aspects of the topography of the moon, the mineralogy of the moon and many other aspects of the moon or the physical, chemical information and also to look at things like water. So that is the kind of a thing. I'll say a little bit about it and also the Mars mission and also AstroSat because AstroSat particularly is because data institute has been very actively involved in realizing this satellite. In fact, bulk of the instruments that came out of AstroSat was from the data institute of fundamental research and then of course, currently in planning are three important missions. One is Chandrayaan two, the second is Aditya and third one if there is a lunar mission as a solar mission and ultimately there is also one which is not put here which is an x-ray polarimeter that we want to fly which is being designed and developed by the Ramana Research Institute in Bangalore. Chandrayaan two, it's going to be a four ton system. It will have an orbiter, a lander and a rover and it will have at least a one year orbital life and the lander itself will have something like one lunar day. This is what is something like 13 Earth days that is the kind of a thing and of course the lander we have named after because this happened next year happens to be the 100th birthday of India space pioneer Dr. Vikram Sarabhai. So the lander of Chandrayaan two will be named as the Vikram lander. So after Vikram Sarabhai and it will have something like 13 instruments that will be flown in the three elements that is the orbital version, the lander version as well as ultimately the rover version. It will do work on topography, mineralogy, surface, chemical composition, thermo physical properties and things of that kind. So the fundamental thing is that there will be enough of data to provide further steps towards understanding the origin and evolution of the moon which is still a debated problem with respect to the moon's origin and in a sense that also puts a certain questions regarding a proper understanding of the theory of evolution of the earth itself. On the other side we are also developing a satellite which will particularly look at the solar physics, the photosphere, the chromosphere and the solar corona region. Now it's going to be called as Aditya. Initially we thought it will be an orbiting system with only a corona graph right around reviewing the program it was decided that we will make it into a 1.5 ton heavy satellite with and which can be located in the Lagrangian point one of the solar system. You know the Lagrangian points are very interesting points in the solar system. At those point if you want to put an object it will work with earth and the moon or earth and the sun and in a synchronous manner. So there is no relative motion between an object in the Lagrangian point one with respect to the sun and the earth. So that is the point it is about 1.5 million kilometers away. So there will be a fairly heavy launch vehicle that will take this particular subject satellite Aditya and it will have instruments as I said with respect to photospheric, chromospheric and coronal studies. And this is stated for 2020. So this is the other part. The third of the missions that I would like to mention there is again a futuristic mission is the X-ray Polaris meter that is being developed is a smaller satellite about 300, 400 kilometers. The most important thing about the polarimeter is that so far the astronomy in X-ray domain has been one of looking at the intensity, one of looking at the spectrum, look at the spatial, the imaging part of it. The fourth dimension of what about the polarization has been unanswered. It has not been studied mainly because of the fact that you need a very different regime of sensitivity and the ability to detect and differentiate between the polarized radiation from the nominal as well as other means. So there is a big challenge in that. Thamandrasas Institute has come out with a very viable instrument with the necessary sensitivity. They say that between 5K EV and 30K EV they have an instrument which is of course it depends on the fundamental principle of the X-ray scattering, the Thompson scattering which provides the necessary capability in terms of the polarization and this is going to be one of the major instrument and probably one of the major missions in the world which will for the first time go with that type of sensitivity that one is looking for into look at the polarization and it will provide you really the important thing is under the extreme magnetic conditions, under the extreme gravity conditions, what will be the nature of the radiation, what will be the emission characteristics and what are the regimes in which this kind of emissions can take place for this radiation. These are the questions that one would seek for this. I would go quickly to the other things when Chandrayaan is a mission that has completely been over now. The important point I would like to say is that this mission certainly was one of the first few to detect the water on the moon. So hydroxyl and water has been one of the major thing. It also studied things like the solar wind especially protons, solar protons which when it gets into the lunar surface, they are able to extract the electron and they go as a neutral hydrogen. 25% of the solar wind protons are today returned back into the space as a neutral hydrogen. So it's a very interesting observation that was made out of it. There are of course many other things like the lunar magma ocean hypothesis. And that is an important index for that. Then crater geometry is another kind of a thing, buried lava, but here you can see I have summarized the 11 instruments that has gone on this. Most important thing is five of the instruments were built by us. Spacecraft were designed and built by us. The entire mission was conducted by us. What I mean by mission is the fact you see how the orbit has been raised initially around the earth to increasing apogee and then ultimately it put in a trans-lunar injection orbit and then insertion into the lunar orbit and ultimately bring it closer to the moon in terms of nearly 100 kilometer. In fact I should say to keep an object very close to the moon at 100 kilometers is more difficult than allowing the moon object to crash on the moon. So it is so complicated in terms of the calculations. But that was what was done by the Chandrayaan one and it has produced some very interesting results which has been appropriately presented in the peer reviewed journals all over the world. This is of course the Ganglion, the one which went up to 400 million kilometers. It took 300 days to travel that interplanetary regime from earth to Mars. Of course many, many things have to be done first time. Things like artificial intelligence, expert systems, deep phase communication network and the ability to communicate with the satellite once it is near the Mars because it takes 22 minutes for a signal to reach Mars and get a reply. So obviously you cannot do any real time control on the satellite. So you need to put those things on the satellite. It has to look for problems. It has to diagnose the problem, analyze the problem and immediately put the corrective state. That's what I said expert systems, artificial intelligence. This is one of the futuristic missions in terms of India's ability to do the planetary mission. Of course it also carried five instruments, metal, diamond, photometer, Mars-colored camera, methane sensor, thermothermal infrared and so on. And very interesting results of course have come. So several tons of papers have been published in journal of geophysical research, planetary letters and things of that kind. And I won't go into the details of the scientific basis of this. But what is important is it really puts us at a bleak because it is also said that it is the first time that any incarnation was successful in inserting an object into the planetary regime without either getting crashed or getting escape out of, getting an escape velocity. So that the very fact that it went exactly into the orbit in the very first attempt showed the intricate calculation that were carried out by the scientists certainly have been validated in the success. So the last of the astrosat is still very much in the picture. Several papers are coming out. I think Nalini, Sandeep will be able to say more about it, more than 500 objects have been studied whether it is related to neutron star base system, gap systems with black holes, with UVAT, with the fast fluctuations that is typical of the even horizon near the black hole. These are kind of things that have been detected and what is also very interesting is something that was unexpected but then it came out was an instrument called cadmium zinc telluroid which was built by the Rata Institute group. They have been able to look at polarization in the crab, a 33 millisecond pulsar and they have been able to see for the first time concrete positive evidence of the polarization from crab coming out of these spin-off really but nevertheless it was detected. And so that's a very interesting and this will be the precursor to the X-ray polarimeter with that Raman Rasech Institute is building for the next in the next two years to be launched. This is the fourth element of the space program which is of the advanced access to space and so you have the PSLV currently operational as I said it can take 1.2 tons in the geosynchronous transfer orbit over 3.5 tons into the Leo but primarily it is used for polar mission that is a mission in which the orbit is from pole to pole. The advantage of a pole to pole mission is the fact that if you put a camera in such a satellite the earth is rotates below this because that is the 24 hour rotation. The orbit it's the first approximation is fixed in the inertial space. So with respect to that you can start scanning the earth from off different locations. So that's how the remote sensing covers the whole of the globe by being in one orbit but then there are small corrections to be applied in the orbit simply because of the fact earth is not a first phase sphere. So all those are general polynomials that you develop just got higher harmonics so you have the problems of that. So nominally you need to have corrections and those corrections are appropriately applied to maintain the sun synchronism. The other important thing is the orbit has to be sun synchronous so that the sun solar rays comes at a particular point on the ground at the constant angle so that the vagaries or the ambiguities that come out of varying solar angle which also can complicate the interpretation of the image is avoided. So sun synchronism, polar orbit, these are sand orbital correction. These are some of the challenges of having a PSLV mission but it has been a very successful mission. GSLV the next version is a heavy satellite launcher we're taking up to geosynchronous orbit 2.5 tons in GTO and 5 tons it can go into a lot of the earth orbit. Then currently they're going to be a very important it's almost I always consider it as the equivalent of a 747 Boeing which is the GSLV Mark III which is a 4.5 it will have a 10 ton into the Leo and this is the one that will be man rated to go for the first of the India's manned mission. So the vehicle has been already proved with respect to the regular use. Now they will have to put it into the man rating process but the engineers are very confident that that's not going to be a major challenge. The whole idea of man rating is that you have acceleration you have the shocks and you have acceleration and shock and therefore you have to make sure that they are kept within certain level by means of appropriate design and of course the reliability is the most important thing but then there are enough redundancies and other kinds of features that you build up in this kind of a vehicle and of course the next one currently under development in this row is the semi cryogenic system which is a 6 ton into the GTO which is again will be a human rated one which is a GSLV semi cryogenic system. The difference between semi cryogenic and the cryogenic uses a liquid oxygen liquidization. So there's a little difference in the difficulty in handling the quantity of say liquid oxygen is 20 degrees, liquid nitrogen is something like 60 degrees Kelvin whereas here you can use kerosene and liquid oxygen. So it becomes very benign as a fuel and much easier to handle. So and it also gives you a little better thrust. So this will be the next version and lastly of course advancement to the access of state is going to be using reusable recoverable system. You would maybe reading beyond much ideas of how we how he brings it back and how it can be reused and once you use and reuse it then the cost of transportation comes down and the whole idea is from a person cost which is something like $20,000 per kilogram to be put for the geosynchronous orbit. We have to bring it down if it won't be affordable to many other nations and many other groups we have to bring it down to something like $2,000 to $5,000 per kilogram. So there are many things which are that in the air breathing engines, the recoverable system, reusable system. These are also so many of these things are under early stages of testing within ISRO. I go next to the human flight because now we have been talking with a lot of caution in the past in this kind of lectures but this time having the prime minister already go to us to write a work on the human space flight and he has also told that 75th birthday I mean 75th freedom day of India we should have this up the Indians will be circling the earth, three of them of course that is also there and he has also not characterized whether it should be man or a woman he said it could be either of them so he has put quite a lot of conditions too. So we are working on that and there's a great challenge something I think the initial versions will have a 400 kilometer kind of an altitude and it will take about 16 minutes to read the particular altitude so three people are off from the ground and 16 minutes they are there and of course a fairly large area 3.7 meters to seven meters and you need to select them so there's going to be a major things there are dozens of aspiring astronauts men and women trying to buy with each other to go to the space and come back and there are many critical technologies that on which a lot of experiments have been carried out things like reentry system, crew escape system thermal protection system, life support systems and space suit and things of that kind so there are many such things that is going to be there but many areas have been already initial tests and also ISRO will certainly work with other countries which are willing to come forward and it has been so in the earlier programs also with the idea that ultimately we will be a part of a larger space community working together on a global basis so if they want to make sure that India is a part of it and they always find India to be a very good partner the most of the country is irrespective of politics they found us to be an excellent partner because our engineers are easy to work with and extremely good in analysis of various issues which they probably sometimes take much more number of people and even then they don't come with the final solution in fact the Israelis once told us that you are engineers guys simply take a back of the envelope and do some calculation and put in the satellite 104 satellites goes in all the direction as you want it we are not able to think about that kind of thing so that you know the kind of feeling they have about India's space engineers and scientists is remarkable it has to be felt when other countries look at you and they tell you I just thought I should say that so the partnership for the human space flight certainly will be there there will be a lot of offers it's up to us to decide what is the strategy that we want to adopt and then of course I go to the last of the thing so where is it going to be there was some discussion on 50 years later how would the space will fare as a global activity so one of the things that will happen is of course we need to create a blueprint for managing the planet that blueprint should have all the elements of the complex behavior of this planet whether it is physical, chemical, biological and so on so how do you create that you need lot of data lot of observation, lot of data, lot of information so this has to be global, regional, local and in situ so that is the kind of level set which it has to be there so we need to create this we put them into various types of models so you go into a predictive mode using this kind of information so integrated modeling approach and ultimately what you get is an outcome of this particular model you try to disseminate it to the stakeholders who would like to use it for their own end purposes so that's going to be the way in which the system will move and it will be a global system India will be an important player in this global system and so we put it down this was a presentation that was made in Paris when four of the major international institution came together so we said that the vantage point of space will assume greater significance to understand planet earth as a total system and thus enable better management of the unprecedented scale of changes induced by anthropogenic activities and so on it goes so lastly I would like to just to show that a space dimension is a dimension which is very difficult to recreate in other dimensions of human activity here is a picture of a city I just take the next one that city merges into a settlement so you can see a satellite view of the settlement I go further that settlement is part of a continent which could be India so you see already you have disappeared the weather it is a Karnataka Congress government versus Madhya Pradesh slowly it has merged into this kind of a stuff so you see India as India go to the next one I go a little further with my spacecraft and start taking the picture of the earth you will see India is a part of a subcontinent part of a continent so you can see India is there but this is a part of a continent this is a picture which has been taken from a geosynchronous altitude I go further I use my lunar mission and take the picture of the earth from moon so how does it look you cannot see Kakodgarh's institutions with space institutions here it is all part of a global activity here so it is the earth from the moon so you really start what are you trying to do is to slowly merge features and therefore I hope the way the humans look at those features and try to create artificial barriers they will go and so then if you go further down I go to earth I go to Mars and look at the earth from the Mars you can see the earth is just a point there I hope you are able to see the the earth is there you can you can see that right this one so that is the earth from the Mars and finally the earth from Saturn you can see and there it goes and then when we can leave the solar system your imagination is the best thank you can take a few questions it is a really amazing lecture I think wonderful to hear this about space for the first time I think it was auditorium my question is related to the predictions about the earth behavior and what we were talking about the two two thousand fifty mission so the recent example about the Kerala flood do we able to predict all such kind of behavior of earth yes I think this is the question of you know the one is the climate part of it and the other is the weather part of it when this particular event took place there has been certain level of predictions which was there but I think we have not got accustomed to this kind of a severe weather conditions so to factor that into the daily activities was not something which was easy that is number one the second is when you have this kind of an event which is deluge it is not just a flooding deluge the present system of configuring earth and the active human activities on the earth is done with certain numbers as the limits and if those limits are exceeded you should go into the next one if you look at the middle east they have a certain way of dealing with the heat or hot weather you come to India you have another type of way to deal with the weather if you go to another place like say central portion of an Australia so already the humans adopt themselves depending on how the local systems are and now if these kind of things are becoming more and more severe so you need to have anthropogenic adoption everything cannot be done from the top but certainly the topic information which is in terms of the parameters the parameters going into a modeling that will be strident distinct as more little more strengthened in terms of the ability to predict but I think it is a combination of that along with what you try to do as an anthropological preemptive actions that will find a solution but certainly this is an area which is right now great so I cannot say we have all the knowledge about a severe weather system and how to deal with the severe weather system prediction another question with your kind permission you made us feel proud to be Indian after listening to you about our achievements in space and all these things regarding the self reliance of our space programs and all how deeply that got affected when America put sanctions on us I should say that we have more friends than America that is all it showed so we could solve it yes I mean we always often you know very commendably talk about the high achieving science that comes out of you know the space research in India so we have scientists there we have technologies engineers and mathematicians all working together so my question is about where do they come from I mean do they come from of course obviously from India but from what is the kind of profile that they have do they come from IITs or do they come from abroad or where are these you know high achieving problem solvers actually coming from because it's a very interesting question for us engineers from common colleges that's very interesting to know in fact so you can ask my friend how he feels about he has said that a bigger organization of atomic energy so I can say from ISRO's experience or that I can give you one example the difference between a reasonably good college with an intelligent fellow who can be made out in an interview with respect to somebody who is high bro and come from some of those IB schools is the fact that there could be a one or one and a half years of gap which you can make it up in the within the system itself and they are as good as anybody else this happened in specific experiments we have done on this and we are very clear that there is not of course there are other end of the thing which we should be avoiding but there's a substantial number is available in this country from regular educational systems I don't say bad education regular education system who qualify themselves and perform eminently yeah that could be wonderful example there's no education policy also you know because we are diverting all our energies towards a target which is not really contributing to our own development but many things we need to do in education we will see that as and when we are able to speak about it but I can say that there are special many things which we need to do all further that is I don't say that it's not possible that will enable us to move the islands of excellence into continental proportions if you ask me that way sir how do you look at the privates private space sector in India and do you think that we will have something like common like space x factor coming in India and what are the opportunities for cubes at programs for students in India you know private actors in space today are ones who are primarily contractors to ISRO which is you get good money but less risk because the risk is with ISRO and not with you so that is a very it is in the comfort zone the private road what we are trying to do is to make them do a systemic approach if you have got a complete technology of PSLV there is no reason why a half citizen of the conglomerate of they come together and even the five hundred of those industries which I said they can come together and build that instrument and ISRO will give them quality assurance and many other kinds of support provided they are our facilities like the launch pad they don't want to create as a private launch pad is be there so there can be legal and policy structures which will enable them to make use of government in public investments but they will be on their own they can build it they can market it and they can make money out of it and there can be some agreement with respect to governmental part of their role that they can play this is a realistic thing this is already working and ISRO I understand is already in serious negotiation on this aspect of it the third the second part of it is with respect to things like you see most of the initiate part of a research and development which includes things like recoverable system things like what Yarmus does and so on I think they are high risk areas so public it will have to come from public funding take it up to a particular point of demonstration and then work together with the industry take it to the next step and once it becomes an operational capability put it to the industry to do that so that is another model which we should have on the CubeSat and other things it is a question of stakeholders if there are stakeholders CubeSat is not a big deal so the technology is concerned so if there are enough stakeholders we will build it if there is no stakeholders we will not be able to build it it is totally left to the system for the country to decide which areas of this type will be Thank you Good evening sir I have a question regarding what are ISROS plans regarding the decommissioned satellites which are in the orbit and how do the nations decide where they will put their satellites around the earth? See yes this is a very good point with respect to what do you use to do with respect to satellite which has come outlived its life and there are life is two definitions one is an orbital life orbital life comes in the fact because of the fact that as it revolves around the earth the slowly the atmosphere whatever residual atmosphere is that it keeps dragging it down momentum reduces the momentum reduces it further comes down and so on so finally it will spiral into the atmosphere and ultimately burn so this is one way in which the orbital life is taken on the other side is the one where there is fuel on board once the fuel is exhausted then you will not be able to control the orientation of the satellite or orbital adjustments that you need to do so in those cases they can become a dead mass at that particular altitude because you are not able to control it there are two ways to deal with this one is there are technologies that are being now discussed with respect to how do you refuel the system so that is a still things which has not come to an operational capability the other part of it is you can measure reasonably precisely the amount of fuel that is left because there are sensors with which you can do that once you do that you know within the next three months it is going to run out of the fuel so what you do is you use the remaining fuel you have to calculate how much fuel you need and kick it up or kick it down from the orbit which is the most favored orbit in the case of geosynchronous orbit in the 36000 so I would like to bring it down to say 20,000 kilometers or 25,000 kilometers so that it is no longer going to be a hindrance for the orbital requirements of the communications satellite so that is the other part of it so that is the third thing is with respect to the orbiting system orbiting systems at 800, 900 is still a problem they are trying to see whether it is possible to capture them or try to use a laser to split it into things there are many experiments that are going on or even to do what you call as a you use a big net in which you virtually trap them and bring it down there are things that are of that kind that are being thought about but they are all in the initial stages of thinking and concepts and not an operational system but this is definite you can use the last ounce of fuel the problem with people is when the owners of the satellite if they have to forgo three months of fuel a typical communication satellite transponder is in the market at two to three million dollars per year and a three suppose I reduce the life of the satellite by six months by this activity then at three million dollars per transponder and there are twenty four suppose I take a very conservative twenty four transponder seventy two twenty four transponders into three is seventy two but half of the thirty so thirty six million dollar equivalent of revenue you have to forgo just to save that particular orbit so these are questions there has to be policy and there has to be law which enables you to do this sir I have one more question why can't India join international space station won't it be more viable than then starting our own space mission shuttle like that yes if you have to qualify yourself for anything in this world first you have to have the credentials what is the credential for joining the international space station you should have our own answer sir good evening so one is my my because as we know we are confident that our engineers and scientists will take care of our satellites and other things but my question is about education because you are a member of chairman for the policy commission education policy committee so as I saw in Mumbai schools are run by municipal corporation I am studying government of in karnataka run schools so I feel there is I observe some difference between the government runs government department of education run schools and the municipal corporation schools so municipal normally to just clean the drains and clean the the city clean so corporations running the schools is not a good idea so in your policy I request you that make it clear that the schools should belong to should be the business of the government governments rather the municipal corporations so corporations can work only to eradicate polio and mosquito and other things their rats they let them do that business only not to venture into the education so that you can get a very good impart as good education to the school skills and other that level and also one more is why one of my friend a scientist in NIL Bangalore he left for the private business private company job and now he is actually repenting I should have continued working with like a national building so this is how we can how we can drain so people living in a like conditions so like when maybe as well as there are people who are joined rents living the government of in the organizations so how can we gain back the train train gain also many governments are working on the train gain how we can again we can achieve that we can attract the best minds towards the scientific achievements and other things and through your education policy education policy for schools we have initiated a broader picture of how it will be regulated how it will be funded what kind of outcomes you need how do you do yeah a city you know what is that called accreditation processes this is very thoughtfully we have enunciated the principles behind this and it is not the question of the difference between private and public it will always be put in this so far there is always this feeling that private is a better education I would like to send it to my my child to a private education that is one aspect of it the second is there are other schools like CBCN other kinds of institutions are very good ones on the other side so we are trying to bring make sure that the state run education institutions and other local level institutions are corrected to bring to the level in which the present better run schools are done number one and they we are also looking at the question of complexes it is not one institute you know they are running this educational institution in this country at individual levels in many locations geographic location is not viable simply because of the fact that they won't fulfill all the requirements of a teaching because the number of students and the number of teachers available in the economics so there have been earlier discussions on the complexes so if you try to bring in the concept of complexes a governor's system which addresses the question through the complexes and don't have any kind of a distinction between the different uh... private public and uh... municipal and those kind of a thing and we have written here that what they represent what we need to do for that I think the point that you know ultimately will be taken care of but ultimately on the ground we have to implement it that at that this particular stage more important is that we clearly understand the issues and enunciate the approach that we need to do being a librarian uh... because all of many many of our we see that the NPE also and other things only our all of us body like IACT and UGC they are uh... we are marking budgets for libraries you know this is the last few years also we have seen that every year five years five years five percent five percent and ten percent budget cuts for the libraries no I I I think I think without libraries we don't don't even this particular policy comes let us not try to put the benchmark of the previous actions otherwise you will reach nowhere yeah because you have a policy you have certain commitments for that policy in terms of resources whether it is human whether it is finance or whether it is infrastructure and we have to have the best of the practices they are all properly enunciated if you start saying that my library they cut cut ten percent percent and if I use that model and proper account this policy is doomed the other part of it is you said about what is the other part of the brain drain away from nation building but you said NAL has gone right yes sir from NAL went to private enforces but what is what is wrong they are all national wealth I think we should not too much distinguish about this private public and enforces is not national or not private and not public no I think the best of the brains in India should work anywhere and contribute anywhere and the country should benefit and we have got enough people not worry about this kind of small examples evening sir my question is about graphene a couple of years back graphene came out as a new product to be used in the space for the heating systems it made a very awesome sound in the space industry then it just lost its value like we were promised us elevators to space better spacecraft that wouldn't heat up on the re-entering but we haven't seen yet that we have yet to see the use of graphene the spacecraft why is it taking so much time I don't set the agenda for what material to be used for what purposes so the question if you want to ask me what is the future of graphene yeah if you really look at the graphene it's a wonder of material because in one layer of a carbon you produce a strength which is incredible compared to the any other chemical so obviously that is the property I'm sure engineers will use it if they are not used there should be some other type of limitation they may be finding and they may be working on it uh... you know and people who announce positively and optimally optimal great optimism about certain development they don't take it to the logically and you should understand and what you are telling me the first-level announcements but first-level announcement is not the last word on the usage of that unfortunately so that is one thing you should be careful and there are many such examples why only graphene there are many examples in which a first-level announcement has been made and it is going to be a wonder and it is to be if this is going to solve this problem this problem and this problem what do they have got other alternatives at that particular point economics for example if I ask you the counter question what are the economics of using graphene for a certain type of application are you working out at any time? it's expensive now that's the point thank you sir so it's regarding the along with people closely he has asked for the delusion kerala and another one is with the yuki cyclone in Tamil Nadu what has happened to both the time the cyclone was there so these two things have happened even though the IRS was working most of the TV IMD people what they were showing it on TV they did not say anything about what is going to happen or what is predicted they said heavy to very heavy rain is expected on both the side both the time this why I'm saying is this we have the technology the end user is not having any use of it many times I have found I am from Tamil Nadu I keep watching the channel regarding the fishermen every time you find the Tamil Nadu fishermen being caught by the cyclones and they say they have been caught because they have crossed the international border why this is happening why it is not being transferred to the layman yeah it is yes on one side the the last mile communication even in the earlier times we have found that the road problems of that kind of a thing that they are singled out and pointed out as one of the deficiency I would also like to say that there was a cyclone for example in andhra pradesh in 80s where something like 100,000 people were affected and then came this kind of very rigorous satellite data use ground system use and also modeling and simulation in the next similar one nearly only 100 people were affected so you can look at the numbers and clearly look at it don't take up one example of some fishermen not having got it yes certainly quite possible and you know the there is a scale in which the whole system has working today that also need to be looked in if you really look at some portions of it they will solve the problem in an ender state has gone under the water then you need a different ball game to deal with it so I can't I can't answer your question because I am not a part of that operational team that is going on there but I can say I can guess that it needs to be studied in a much more a way in which the scale up and the communication is with which the thing gets into operational system is so wrong you should also understand at the way if you I mean this is not a I hope there is no press people here you had also the problems in united states in two or three states you know and the they showed the floods some years back in what way and they also put them in the camps they had also to rebuild many things in what way were they very different they've officially got everything given in the last minute and so that everybody was happy you know why I am telling you there are certain aspects of operational detail which need to be looked in I am not telling that but this is not specific to India this is a broader question to be seen I don't know and you have any view on this same thing you look at it supposing these facilities were not there as they just said an earlier cyclone hundred thousand of that order people lost their life the next cyclone several orders of magnitude the fatalities came down now basically there may be an individual case where the service is not and certainly we should work to improve our system to reach there but things have improved nobody can deny that things are not improved actually I am not talking about the things having improved or not improved the thing is the transformation from the higher to the lower see look at the technology we have we have the technology to go into the space but these issues are not just technology these are technology technology management going up to the last man including governance system so that will involve a debate which will cover I think much wider range of expertise which probably doesn't exist here so it's the totality that's important can be I think we take yeah good evening sir so I want to know what are some of the initiatives taken by ISRO for space pollution particularly for space pollution considering many of the satellites have been up there and many countries have raised their concerns about there are not enough initiatives by all countries for the space pollution you know there is now a committee under the united nations committee for outer space UN corpus and that is called as a committee to mitigate the disaster coming out of space pollution and India is the chairman of that committee right now they are working out a strategy for the global community to follow and that will be finally discussed in the UN corpus and it will be passed as a policy and if necessary it will go to the UN General Assembly and it will be passed as a thing which all the nations have to obey so India is really the focus of preparing the necessary policy for it what more can we expect out of India I think we will stop with that question good evening it gives me great pleasure to present the vote of thanks for the 17th VGK Memorial Talk firstly I thank Dr. Kasturi Rangan for a very insightful and detailed tracing of the history of the Indian space research program and for the question answers which were at times quite difficult this talk had all the elements of an insider watching an institution grow and that is where I bring it link it to VG Kulkarni this aspect of founding and nurturing an institution is what I remember of VGK and as was mentioned earlier he was the founder director and was the chair for 20 long years and it is his legacy and vision that we are all playing out even now I thank all the previous center directors especially Prof. Arvind Kumar who instituted this memorial talk and Prof. H.C. Pradhan who is there in the audience and Prof. Jayashree Ramdas perhaps who is watching us on Facebook and who was the first doctoral student of Prof. VG Kulkarni all of them including Prof. Subramanyam the present center director have always supported this VGK Memorial Talk I am very grateful to Prof. Sandeep Trivedi for supporting this function and Prof. Dr. Anil Kakorkar for gracing this occasion next I come to thanking the family of VG Kulkarni I thank Mrs. Kulkarni who has always been with us and I hope she continues to be with us for a very very long time I thank Anita VGK's daughter and Raju VGK's son-in-law and Chandrasekar Kulkarni and Kishore Kulkarni who always have tried to participate in this event coming to HBCSC I will say that like Dr. Kasturi Rangan mentioned any event or any organization requires the help of various people so I am not going to name all of them but I thank all the HBCSC administrative, technical, scientific and the faculty for their help in organizing this event and lastly this audience consists of a number of dignitaries and I invite all of you to join us for tea thank you