Today marks the anniversary of the death of one of India's
greatest scientists, Dr. Vikram Ambalal Sarabhai. Regarded as the father of India's space
program, the noted physicist is also remembered as "a rare combination of an
innovator, industrialist and visionary".
Early Life
Vikram Sarabhai was born on August 12, 1919 in Ahmedabad, a
city in western India,
to a wealthy family that practiced Jainism, an ancient dharmic religion whose
tenets include non-violence and spiritual progress. Sarabhai's father owned a
series of mills in Gujarat,
India's
westernmost state. His mother founded a private Montessori school to educate
her eight children. Both parents were involved in India's independence movement,
which aimed to end British colonial rule.
Scientific Education
As a young man, Vikram Sarabhai attended Gujarat College
in Ahmedabad and passed the intermediate science examination. He later moved to
England and earned a science
degree from St. John's College in Cambridge.
In 1940, Sarabhai returned to his native land and became a research scholar at
the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore,
under the direction of Nobel Prize winner Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman.
For several years, Vikram Sarabhai built and operated scientific
equipment at solar and cosmic ray observatories in Bangalore,
Poona, and the Himalayas.
In 1945, however, he returned to Cambridge,
England to
complete his Ph.D. Two years later, Vikram came home to a newly-independent India,
with a doctorate for his thesis entitled Cosmic
Ray Investigation in Tropical Latitudes.
PRL and TERLS
In November of 1947, Dr. Vikram Sarabhai founded the
Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) in Ahmedabad and became its first director. There,
the 28-year old Sarabhai researched the time variations of cosmic rays. PRL - a
few rooms at the M.G. Science Institute - later received financial support from
two prominent national organizations: India's Council of Scientific and
Industrial Research (CSIR) and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE).
Vikram Sarabhai's work at PRL continued during the 1950s, a
decade marked by the International Geophysical Year (IGY) and the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik on October 4, 1957. As
the superpowers ran their Space Race, Dr. Sarabhai was named the chair of the
Indian National Committee for Space Research. The rocket launching station
(TERLS) that he established at Thumba sent its first sodium vapor payload into
space on November 21, 1963. Two years later, the U.N. General Assembly recognized
TERLS as an international facility.
INSAT and Aryabhata
In 1966, Vikram Sarabhai met with NASA about the Satellite
Instructional Television Experiment (SITE), a satellite communications project that
would provide television programming to over 2500 Indian villages during the
1970s. Sarabhai's involvement in the SITE project also spurred the development
of India's
own satellite program, INSAT, which launched the nation's first satellite from
a Soviet Cosmodrome in 1975. Named "Aryabhata" in honor of the first of many great
Indian mathematician-astronomers, the satellite was a triumph for the Indian
Space Research Organization (ISRO).
During the final years of his career, Dr. Vikram Sarabhai was
named head of India's
atomic energy commission. He later served as president of the General
Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and vice-president
of the fourth U.N. conference on peaceful uses of atomic energy. Sarabhai's
death on December 31, 1971 preceded the launch of India's Aryabhata satellite, but did
not diminish the physicist's place in history. Today, the ISRO's lead facility
for launch vehicle development, the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC), is
named in his honor.
Resources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikram_Sarabhai
http://www.iloveindia.com/indian-heroes/vikram-sarabhai.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jain
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_Instructional_Television_Experiment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryabhata
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