ISRO’s Chandrayaan releases image of crater named after Bengali physicist
Sisir Kumar Mitra was an Indian scientist whose research helped the Sputnik mission
Sisir Kumar Mitra was an Indian scientist whose research helped the Sputnik mission
Sisir Kumar Mitra was an Indian scientist whose research helped the Sputnik mission
Sisir Kumar Mitra was an Indian scientist whose research helped the Sputnik mission
ISRO has released the second set of images its Chandrayaan 2 mission, where the orbiter’s “Terrain Mapping Camera 2” (TMC-2) photographed three craters on the moon’s Northern hemisphere on the side of the moon facing away from the earth, one of which was named after a renowned Bengali physicist.
According to ISRO’s website, the Mitra crater “is named after Prof. Sisir Kumar Mitra, who was an Indian physicist and Padma Bhushan recipient known for his pioneering work in the field of ionosphere and Radiophysics.”
Mitra notably pioneered research into ‘wireless’ radiowaves in India, starting the first post-graduate programme in the same at Calcultta University. As a member of the “Radio Club”, Mitra was among the few to work on an amateur radio programme in India — years before the Indian Broadcasting Company (All India Radio’s precursor) begun operations.
At the Wireless Laboratory he had set up, Mitra developed his research on measuring the ionosphere, the electrically-charged regions of the earth’s atmosphere that extends between 60 to 500 km above the earth’s surface. He formulated one of the first scientific explanations for the origin of the “E-layer” of the ionosphere, later explaining why the night sky was dusty instead of pitch black (due to luminescence in the F-layer of the ionosphere).
Mitra helped build up radio-electronics research in India, training the first batch of students in the subject of wireless research. He studied the upper layers of the atmosphere long before the Indian scientific community were able to send rockets up into space to explore the region themselves. His 1947 book The Upper Atmosphere was considered a “classic on upper atmospheric and ionospheric physics” and sold out 2,000 copies within three years of being published.
According to the Indian Academy of Sciences, when Soviet space scientists were preparing for Sputnik I’s launch, they turned to The Upper Atmosphere to model the lifetime of a satellite.
Mitra died in 1963, just as the Space Age was kicking off around the world. The crater within the moon’s Dirichlet-Jackson Basin was named after him in 1970.