Four city students build a satellite weighing 33.39 grams, probably the world’s lightest and cheapest

Harikrishnan KG clutches the small box in his hand carefully. He nimbly opens it, revealing a concealed black cube, and props it on the table in front of us.

It is just about double the size of the sugar cubes in the coffee shop we’re sitting in. But this isn’t just any trivial cube. It is a satellite.

What Harikrishnan and his three friends from the Hindustan Institute of Technology and Science (HITS) have achieved over the past few months is remarkable... they have designed a satellite weighing just 33.39 grams, which could probably set a record as the world’s lightest and cheapest satellite. The boys have called it Jai Hind 1-S.

Satellite weighing just 33.39 grams, designed by Harikrishnan and his three friends from the Hindustan Institute of Technology and Science in Chennai.

Jai Hind was made mostly on the campus and homes, with locally sourced materials. But it has a long way to go, literally. It will travel to the United States next month and find a place, among other scientific material, at the Colorado Space Grant Consortium, NASA.

There, it will be put in a special high-pressure balloon and sent to — hold your breath — space.

Time to innovate

Jai Hind’s inception started a year ago, when Harikrishnan chanced upon Cubes in Space, a competition across the world for students who have a penchant for innovation in science. “I’d long wanted to build a rocket, having been inspired by films like October Sky. Growing up, I realised that it might be a costly affair. Working on a satellite was a tempting alternative.”

His friends — Amarnath P, Giri Prasad T and Sudhi G — shared his dream and when he bounced the idea of building a satellite to them, they were up for it. “We read about a team that had previously built a satellite weighing 64 grams, and wanted to build one that weighed less than that,” says Amarnath.

The work wasn’t easy; apart from sourcing the materials, they had to scour the Internet for information. Thankfully, they got help from close quarters, when a professor, G Dinesh Kumar, volunteered to mentor them. They chose nylon as one of the core materials to make the satellite, a decision they took after much apprehension. But they’re confident now. “We’re excited to see how it’ll react in space. We’re confident that nylon will withstand the pressures of being in outer space,” says Giri Prasad. The belief stems from the many games they’ve played with Jai Hind in the last few months, like placing it inside a balloon and flying it from the top of their college terrace. And placing it inside the fridge for a few hours. And lighting it up with a cigarette lighter.

Up above the sky

The four come from varied backgrounds: one of them is a handball player, one has spent a considerable part of his childhood in Dubai, while the other two have been serious about “planes and flying” from a young age. But currently, they’re all focussed on how their satellite fares in outer space.

“It will be a 15-20 hour journey, sometime in August,” says Sudhi. Once the high-pressure balloon, containing scientific material by students from across the world, travels up to a certain point in space, it will burst and all the material will be gathered by the team at NASA.

“We can’t wait for the day when we will get our Jai Hind in our hands,” says Harikrishnan. Once they get it, all they have to do is retrieve the SD card that will contain all the data and findings. “We hope to find data like temperature, UV density and vapour pressure, among other things, at various points of the satellite’s upward journey. This will help in research and better understanding of the environment in outer space.”