Team News Riveting
Kochi, January 15
S Somanath, a rocket scientist who is in Space field since 1985, is the head of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and secretary of the Department of Space.
He succeeds K Sivan, whose term ended on January 14. Since January 2018, S Somanath has been the director of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC). For the next three years, he will serve as Secretary of the Department of Space and Chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).
A native of Aroor in the Alappuzha district of Kerala, Somanath became the fourth Malayali to hold the coveted post of ISRO Chairman after K Kasturirangan, G Madhavan Nair, and K Radhakrishnan. He had graduated in Mechanical Engineering from the TKM College of Engineering in Kollam.
Somanath holds a Master’s degree holder in aerospace engineering from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, and is a Gold medalist. He had joined Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) in 1985 and was the project manager of GSLV Mk-III from June 2010 to 2014.
He played a key role in three successful missions of GSLV with indigenous cryogenic stages and eleven successful missions of PSLV. In June 2015, Somnath was named director of ISRO’s Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre (LPSC), Thiruvananthapuram.
Under him, 15 successful satellite missions were accomplished with the propulsion systems supplied from LPSC. Somanath was serving as the is the Director of (VSSC) since 2018.
Somanath is an expert in the area of system engineering of Launch vehicles. His contributions in PSLV and GSLV MkIII were in their overall architecture, propulsion stages design, structural and structural dynamics designs, separation systems, vehicle integration, and integration procedures development.
