ISRO Offers Excellent Career Opportunities In Space Travel, Said A NASA Expert

Talented young Indians who nurture a dream of having a career in space travel do not need to venture far from their own country, as the ISRO (Indian Space Research Organization) already offers excellent chances, said an American expert.

At an event to celebrate the UN General Assembly’s “Word Space Week,” Ann Devereaux, Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s (JPL) spacecraft system engineering manager, said that students interested in astronomy and space could look for career prospects in India's ISRO instead of any other countries as the space agency is doing some exciting things.

Space Week is held yearly by the UN from the first to the 10^th of October. These dates coincide with the Sputnik 1's launch date, the first artificial satellite, on October 1, 1957, and the Outer Space Treaty’s signing on the 10th of October, 1967.

JPL is a part of NASA (US’s National Aeronautics and Space Agency). The research facility is in Caltech (California Institute of Technology), and it focuses on earth science and robotic missions. JPL is funded by the federal and it now has ten primary instruments and 19 spacecraft to conduct missions on earth science, astronomy, and research on other planets.

In the motivational speech given at the Visvesvaraya Industrial and Technological Museum to high school students, Ann said that she would rather motivate young Indians to think of a future with ISRO.

Since ISRO and NASA are collaborating on several projects on space exploration, Ann said that organizations like ISRO need competent staff to work with other agencies on space programs and inter-planetary exploration for a greater good.

She said that India had no shortage of talents, Team Indus, a Bengaluru-based space firm was a prime example. the company is working to launch a private satellite that may hitchhike a rocket of ISRO with crowdfunding and sponsorship. The team is now competing to get Google Lunar X Prize. All of the members attended schools in India and their ambition is to send a commercial lunar rover to the surface of the Moon.

Google Lunar X Prize was introduced to encourage the findings of more affordable ways to reach the Moon, as well as setting up a platform for space startups to create their business models in the field of transportation on the Moon. The program has the prize money of millions of dollars. While the competition did not have a winner, Team Indus is still working toward a lunar rover, which is hoped to be launched in 2020. The team's members come from various backgrounds, from science to media and finance.

Ann Devereaux also holds the position of lead flight segment’s principal engineer of Mars 2020. She has already been to New Delhi, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, and Bengaluru as part of the speakers’ program of the United States' state department. What she does in this visit to India is to talk to startups, students, and teachers about the exploration of space.

She also had a talk with students attending the aeronautical engineering branch of Ramaiah University of Applied Sciences. She also met with scholars of students of aerospace engineering research at IISc.