My Younglings Experience
Explore the world of STEM, You must
Oct 23, 2018
I joined TeamIndus because of my intense curiosity to delve into the intricacies of rocket science. The only company representing India at the Google Lunar XPRIZE, this seemed like a great learning platform for aspiring scientists like me.
I joined TeamIndus because of my intense curiosity to delve into the intricacies of rocket science. The only company representing India at the Google Lunar XPRIZE, this seemed like a great learning platform for aspiring scientists like me.
The grandeur and magnificence of the lander and the rover prototype left me spellbound!
Next, we met Nirmal Sir, one of a kind, who threw some perplexing Orbital Mechanics problems at us. All of us were nonplussed at first, but we found our way to the solution gradually. As the first week ended, we also designed interesting Pamphlets and brochures for inquisitive underprivileged children.
Among scientists & engineers at TeamIndus are a bunch of teenagers, learning about the mission and working on projects!
Monday, 12th June: 7 younglings flew from different parts of the world to join the program. As we went through the three-day presentation of the subsystems at TeamIndus, wandering questions found answers from experts.
I not only grasped the most difficult scientific concepts but also made life long friends.
As this week progressed, we went to our respective subsystems where we could understand concepts in depth and work on mission problems. Vivek Sir, Shyam Sir, and Nardhini Ma’am took us through Image Processing used by the lander and the rover, and python script writing.
The best part was that all of the programmers- Arushi, Arya, and I, witnessed the application of the theory we were learning at school.
We started working on MATLAB to match two lunar images taken from a specific distance. We found the ‘false matches’ in these two images and corrected them through this software.
Arya and I worked on Lunar Descent Camera Fault Detection, spending days to find the difference between good images and bad images. We used parameters such as variance and standard deviation of pixel values to achieve our objective. With Shyam sir’s valuable inputs, we could work with computer vision to differentiate between a set of lunar images. I found this project quite interesting as a similar technology is used by tech giants such as Google in applications like Goggles. Finally, we worked on python scripting, using Selenium, to extract Satellite images from a webpage. I truly loved this project!
During the lunch, we went to the cafeteria where we encountered scientists Mr. Srinivasa Hegde, the mission director of Chandrayaan-1, and several other senior ISRO scientists, who shared their fascinating life stories with us.
My friend Manan and I expanded the bounds of our knowledge by talking to the Lab2Moon teams, finding answers to questions that even Google could not answer. These interactions, rigorous work, hours of thinking, and infinite minutes of learning, molded me into a more curious and intelligent person.
Coming as an outstation intern and living on my own for a month inculcated some vital life values which I will take throughout. My experience at Team Indus has been wonderful and I hope to learn more!
You can contact us at moonshot@teamindusfoundation.org for further details on the Younglings program.
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