16yrold girl to get planet named after her
A 12th grader from Bengaluru will get a minor planet in Milky Way named after her as reward for developing a crowdsourced method to monitor pollution in water bodies.
Sahithi Pingali, 16, presented her paper ‘An Innovative Crowdsourcing Approach to Monitoring Freshwater Bodies’ at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF), for which she was awarded the second prize and three special awards in the Earth and Environment Sciences category.
Her school, Inventure Academy, said on its website that she developed “an integrated mobile phone app and lake monitoring kit… to visualise changing lake conditions by crowdsourcing lake monitoring to citizens and students”.
“I definitely didn’t see it coming. I was expecting one special award at the most. I haven’t yet digested the fact that I have a planet named after me,” she said, according to a national daily.
A minor planet will be identified by the Ceres Connection programme of Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory that has partnered with ISEF to motivate budding scientists by giving them a name in space.
ISEF is considered the largest pre-college scientific research event in the world.
Pingali also won a gold medal at International Sustainable World Engineering Energy Environment Project for research on Varthur lake.