Choice between Physics and Biology propels Swati Mohan to NASA
Chennai, Jul 29: It was the choice between physics and biology that had made all the difference to Indian-born Swati Mohan to pursue her passion in space science at NASA.
Swati, who was part of the Mars 2020 Perseverance Mission, said her decision to opt to study physics in high school helped to pursue her passion at NASA.
"Physics was easy and biology didnt come naturally to me the internship at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) gave me the opportunities to learn and explore," the guidance, navigation and control systems engineering group supervisor of NASA's JPL, said.
She was speaking at the launch of the #DiasporaDiplomacy held under the aegis of the US Consulate General in Chennai, on Wednesday. US Consul General in Chennai Judith Ravin inaugurated the virtual series.
From enrolling in space camp at NASA to selecting a school to taking up internships, Swati said she was drawn to exploring and learning about other places in the solar system.
Her parents and her family members including her husband were "super supporters" in helping her chase her passion, the mother of two daughters said.
"There are many Indian Americans and Indians working on Mars 2020 and JPL as a whole," she said responding to queries from students and participants.
Asked if the Indian premier space agency ISRO and NASA would take up joint missions in future, Swati replied, NASA and ISRO are collaborating on NISAR (NASA ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) satellite. The ISRO instrument team is at JPL integrating their portion of the instrument with the JPL portion.
"The JPL team will come to India next year to integrate and launch the spacecraft from India," she said and hoped that NASA and ISRO partnership would continue to grow in future.
NISAR is expected to be launched into a near-polar orbit to observe our planet's land and ice-covered surfaces every 12 days over the course of its three-year mission of imaging the earth's land, ice sheets and sea ice.
While responding to a query on whether she faced trouble because of her origin, she replied, "in my career journey I faced more difficulty in being a woman in a male dominated field than being an Indian."
However, she considered herself blessed at "a diverse organisation like JPL which has a lot of diaspora from many different cultures."
Is she missing India and anything in particular? "I especially miss the street food in India so good especially the corn roasted by the vendors," she replied.
Every time she visits India, she ensures a visit to the restaurants here because the food is so much better. She however hastens to add "of course we have good Indian restaurants here (in USA)."
Let the Truth be known. If you read VB and like VB, please be a VB Supporter and Help us deliver the Truth to one and all.
Haryana land deal: Robert Vadra appears before ED on 3rd day
_vb_32.jpeg)
New Delhi (PTI): Robert Vadra, the businessman brother-in-law of Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi, appeared before the ED on the third straight day on Thursday for questioning in a money laundering case linked to alleged irregularities in a 2008 Haryana land deal case.
The 56-year-old has been questioned for over ten hours in the last two days as part of the investigation and the recording of his statement process under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) will continue Thursday, officials said.
He reached the ED office in central Delhi shortly after 11 am accompanied by his wife Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, who is MP from Wayanad.
Vadra had called the ED action borne out of "political vendetta" against him and his family, and said that while he has always cooperated with the agency and furnished thousands of pages of documents, he needed a "closure" in these cases which are almost 20 years old.
The probe against Vadra is linked to a land deal in Haryana's Manesar-Shikohpur (now sector 83) in Gurugram.
The deal of February 2008 was done by a company named Skylight Hospitality Pvt Ltd, where Vadra was a director earlier, as it purchased a 3.5 acre of land in Shikohpur from Onkareshwar Properties at a price of Rs 7.5 crore.
A Congress government led by Bhupinder Singh Hooda was in power at that time. Four years later, in September 2012, the company sold the land to realty major DLF for Rs 58 crore.
The land deal got embroiled in controversy in October 2012 after IAS officer Ashok Khemka, then posted as the director general of Land Consolidation and Land Records-cum-Inspector-General of Registration of Haryana, cancelled the mutation of this categorising the transaction as violative of state consolidation Act and some related procedures.
The BJP, which was in opposition then, had termed the case an instance of "corruption" in land deals and that of "nepotism", hinting at Vadra's kinship with the first family of the Congress party.
Haryana Police had filed an FIR to probe this deal in 2018.
Vadra has been questioned multiple times by the federal probe agency in two different money laundering cases earlier.
Sources told PTI that the ED will soon file chargesheets in all these three cases being investigated against Vadra.
