(Rajyashree Guha, May 10) Meet Sarang Mani, an Indian student who’s the co-president of a Brown University student team that’s readying to send its second satellite into space. An engineering and economics senior, Bangalore-bred Mani’s team at Brown Space Engineering (BSE) spent about three years to put together a proposal for NASA on PVDX, a small cubesat designed to examine the performance of perovskite solar cells in outer space. The efforts bore fruit with NASA agreeing to provide space on the PVDX between 2022 and 2025. “We want to show that even as students, they can make cool things and send them to space,” Sarang, who’s also a TEDx speaker and FC Barcelona fan, said in a press statement. Three years ago NASA had launched BSE’s first-ever cubesat called EQUIsat, which went on to complete 14,000 trips around Earth. The BSE team plans to work with Indian professor Nitin Padture, an expert in developing perovskites.
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