Overview

My curiosity for astronomy and space technology led me to pursue this internship during my second year of college, and it exceeded my expectations. I worked with researchers from Raman Research Institute working on studying the 21-cm Hydrogen line from radio quiet regions. As it turns out, the nearest truly radio quiet region is the far side of the Moon. PRATSUH is a planned lunar radiometer which will help us answers questions regarding the birth of our first stars after Big Bang.

Unfortunately, due to the extremely uneven gravitational field of the Moon, most orbits are unstable and require frequent station keeping maneuvers. In order to make the mission economically viable and scientifically significant the orbiter is required to spend maximum amount of time in radio quiet regions on the far side of the moon while also keeping station keep maneuvers to a minimum.

Designing the lunar orbit, keeping in mind the physical attributes (mass, size, shape etc.) of the probe, was done in GMAT, General Mission and Analysis Tool, an open source project developed by NASA. The analysis on proposed orbits was done using Python, Pandas and Matplotlib.

I presented my findings to the Astronomy and Astrophysics Club at RRI and hopefully one day PRATUSH will be in lunar orbit unraveling the mysteries of the universe!