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)."
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Alappuzha (Kerala) (PTI): The Congress on Friday sharply reacted to the Income Tax Department's notice to the grand old party to pay a penalty of over Rs 1,750 crore and said the officials were being used as the "gundas" of the ruling BJP.
Addressing the media here, AICC general secretary in-charge of the organisation, K C Venugopal, lashed out at the Narendra Modi-led BJP government and accused it of trying to "financially strangulate" the opposition parties during the election time.
Venugopal said the Modi government was trying to make the Congress party bankrupt.
The Income Tax Department has served a notice to the Congress to pay over Rs 1750 crore, hours after the Delhi High Court had rejected its petitions challenging the tax reassessment proceedings against it.
"Usually, the political parties are exempted from paying taxes. However, this penalty is in the name of delay in filing returns. The Narendra Modi government is doing this with the specific purpose of bankrupting the Congress party at a time when we are facing elections," Venugopal said.
He said a nationwide protest will be held tomorrow and the day after as the BJP was "exploiting" the central agencies to target the opposition parties.
"They are attacking the opposition parties using the government mechanism. This is a move to butcher democracy," Venugopal added.
He also claimed that the BJP too has not paid any returns, but they were safe from IT Department notices.
"Our accounts were freezed earlier and now our funds have been blocked. The BJP regime is exploiting the government machinery to target the main opposition party as they know that they will face a huge setback in the upcoming elections," he said.
Venugopal said as per the notice, the Congress has been asked to pay Rs 1076.35 crore as penalty and Rs 692 crore as interest.
The Delhi High Court on Thursday rejected petitions by the Congress challenging the initiation of tax reassessment proceedings against it for a period of four years by tax authorities.
The High Court said that the pleas were dismissed in terms of its earlier decision refusing to interfere with the opening of reassessment for another period.
The present matter pertained to the assessment years 2017 to 2021.
In the earlier petition, which was dismissed last week, the Congress party had challenged initiation of reassessment proceedings pertaining to the assessment years 2014-15 to 2016-17.
On March 22, the high court, while rejecting those pleas, said that the tax authority had prima facie collated "substantial and concrete" evidence warranting further scrutiny and examination.