Sunday, October 19, 2008

‘Designing Chandrayaan was like writing lyrics to a set tune’

More kudos for M Annadurai

Chennai, Oct 19 (IANS) While building India’s first moon craft, Chandrayaan project director Mylswamy Annadurai was reminded of his engineering college days when he wrote lyrics to the tunes of his classmates.

At that time he used to write poetry - some were published in the college magazine.

‘One of the many challenges in building the spacecraft is to accommodate the six overseas pre-built payloads. We had to design the spacecraft accordingly - sort of writing lyrics to a tune,’ 50-year-old Annadurai told IANS from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota, 80 km from here.

The man who will go down in space annals as the designer of India’s first moon orbiter was born in the small village of Kotavadi in Pollachi district of Tamil Nadu. He graduated from the Government College of Engineering, Coimbatore, and did his Masters at PSG College of Technology in the same city.

Now Annadurai is a veteran at the India Space Research Organisation (ISRO), having joined it in 1982.

‘ISRO offers the good freedom even to freshers,’ he said, citing his own experience when he suggested software modelling of ISRO satellites.
Read more HERE.