In 2024, the COSPAR Harrie Massey Award went to Prahlad Chandra Agrawal, a notable Indian astrophysicist. The recipient was honored during the opening ceremony of the 45th COSPAR Scientific Assembly held in Busan, South Korea on July 15, 2024.
The prize is awarded for exceptional contributions to space exploration through positive influence. A medal and citation accompany it while a small planet is named as 20064 Prahlad agrawal in consideration of this year’s awardee.
Astro Sat’s Principal Investigator Mr.Prahlad Agarwal was instrumental in its development. It was launched by ISRO on September 28th, 2015 with about Rs400 crores that was approved by DST in the year 2004. Its suite has four co-aligned instruments and an X-ray sky monitor which make it able to observe celestial objects simultaneously at several wavebands.
It was developed by TIFR (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research) along with IIA (Indian Institute of Astrophysics), Bangalore and UR Rao Satellite Centre at ISRO.
Astro Sat which had initially been planned as a five-year mission, continues to collect valuable data with one recent discovery being a black hole binary source. Astro Sat’s observations have led to over five hundred scientific papers and more than thirty doctoral dissertations since astronomers began using it. The Astro Sat data can be freely accessed by any researcher from around the world.
Dr.Agrawal used to be senior professor at TIFR’s Space Physics department
Dr.B.V.Sreekantan and K.Kasturirangan were named by Dr.Agrawal in his acceptance speech as people who helped him a great deal when he became accepting this prize for India.He worked as a postdoctoral fellow at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory before participating in the realization of NASA’s HEAO-1 A4 instrument. The team under his leadership had developed Indian X-ray Astronomy Experiment on the board of IRS P-3 satellite launched on March 1996.
Dr. Agrawal was a member of ISRO Lunar Task Force that drew up the Project report for India’s first mission to moon, Chandrayaan 1.
He has also been a member or chairman of several important Governing Councils including Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Aryabhata Research Institute of Observational Sciences, and IIIp.
In his acceptance speech he thanked Dr.B.V.Sreekantan, who was his mentor as well as the former director at TIFR, and Mr.Kasturirangan; the latter being an ex-chairman of ISRO without whom it would be impossible to reach such significant milestone for India’s space sector.
