Bengaluru girl, 16, to get planet named after her for research, app on lake pollution

india

Updated: Jun 08, 2017 17:31 IST

A twelfth grader from Bengaluru will get a minor planet in Milky Way named after her as reward for developing a crowd-sourced method to monitor pollution in water bodies.

Sahithi Pingali, 16, presented her paper “An Innovative Crowdsourcing Approach to Monitoring Freshwater Bodies” at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) for which she was awarded the second position prize and three special awards in the Earth and Environment Sciences category.

Her school, Inventure Academy, said on its website that she developed “an integrated mobile phone app and lake monitoring kit… to visualise changing lake conditions by crowdsourcing lake monitoring to citizens and students”.

“I definitely didn’t see it coming. I was expecting one special award at the most. I haven’t yet digested the fact that I have a planet named after me,” she said, according to The Hindu.

A minor planet will be identified by the Ceres Connection program of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory, which has partnered with ISEF to motivate budding scientists by giving them a name in space.

ISEF is regarded as the largest pre-college scientific research event in the world.

In addition to the ISEF accolades, she also won a gold medal at the International Sustainable World Engineering Energy Environment Project (ISWEEEP) for her research work on Varthur lake.