Washington, July 5, 2005
S. Rajagopalan
When he watched Halley's Comet through binoculars
many years ago, Shyam Bhaskaran used to wonder
if he would be able to pursue his cosmic passion.
Little did he realise then that the hand of
destiny would lead him to the centrestage of
a comet mission.
On Monday, the second generation Indian American
scientist led the navigation team of NASA's
Deep Impact spacecraft that flawlessly crashed
into comet Tempel 1 as part a grand project
to gain insights into the origins of the solar
system.
Bhaskaran has now worked as a navigator on
several NASA missions at the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory (JPL) n Pasadena, California.
Even so, the Deep Impact was something very
special, he said in a telephone interview amid
widespread relief and satisfaction that everything
has worked to clockwork precision.
Compared with sending a spacecraft to Jupiter,
landing rovers on Mars and even Stardust's technical
feats, Deep Impact presented unprecedented challenges,
recalls Bhaskaran.
The kind of precision needed here was unimaginable,
with the impactor having to hit the comet at
a speed of 23,000 miles per hour.
At such phenomenal speeds, the impactor will
have to guide itself to a target nine miles
long and three miles wide, while a second craft
must get close enough to catch the action.
As Bhaskaran puts it: "There is little
room for error. Even the smallest mistake at
the last minute...you could miss it."
"With Mars and other planets, we know
relatively well where the planets are. This
is not the case with comets, which are not easily
observed because they are small objects with
gas jets. It is much harder to predict their
orbits, which is why we have a little extra
help from a camera on board the spacecraft,"
he explains.
Bhaskaran, whose father taught at the Texas
A&M University for many years, grew up in
the shadows of Houston's Johnson Space Centre,
avidly following NASA's Apollo and space shuttle
programmes. The aerospace engineer earned his
master's at the University of Texas and Ph D
from the University of Colorado.
After starting his career at the JPL in 1992
as an orbit determination specialist on the
Galileo Mission, he has been on the navigation
team of several missions, including Deep Space
1 and Mars Odyssey. He is rated as one of the
principal architects of the autonomous navigation
system used on Deep Space 1. Apart from Bhaskaran,
several other Indian hands have been associated
with the Deep Impact project. They include Keyur
Patel, the project's deputy manager, and Ram
Bhatt, also a member of the navigation team.
