Media Release
Mangaluru, Feb 13: The Foundation Day lecture commemorating the 13th anniversary of laying the foundation stone of St Joseph Engineering College - Vamanjoor, Mangaluru was held on February 11, 2015 at 4:30 pm in the 7th Floor Seminar Hall of Academic Block-III.
The much anticipated Foundation Day Lecture was delivered by C D Sridhara, Deputy Director [Retd.] - Satellite Center, ISRO - Bengaluru. An eminent personality with tremendous contribution to India's satellite success story, including the acclaimed Mars Orbiter Mission, Sri Sridhara spoke at length on the nature of work carried out by ISRO, its relevance to nation building, and their upcoming projects.
Sridhara began his lecture by highlighting the journey of India's premier space research organization from its genesis in a small town Church building in Thumba - Kerala to reaching conquering outer space to reach Mars. He explained the three major activities carried out by ISRO which are, development of launch vehicles, communication satellites, and remote sensing satellites. India's success in developing remote sensing satellites was mentioned. India possesses the world's largest fleet of remote sensing satellites. This has had great impact in the field of agriculture, disaster management, and defence. Growth in India's communication satellites from 1960's to present was also discussed with regard to tele-education, tele-medicine and mobile satellites. However, he stressed the fact that Satellite Communication is an area where ISRO is being challenged in terms of throughput and a lot of work is going in to meet this demand. ISRO's upcoming project, The Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System was also mentioned.
The talk then moved into MOM (Mars Orbiter Mission), in which Sridhara explained the various features of the project, the challenges faced and the technical details of achieving this tremendous success. The talk also touched upon the upcoming projects of ISRO such as, Aditya-LI - the Solar Observation Mission, Chandrayaan-II, and also the Indian Human Spaceflight programme. He concluded his talk with a quote from Mark Zuckerberg - "The biggest risk is not taking any risk... In a world that changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks."
The lecture was followed by an interaction session moderated by Dr Prakash Pinto, Dean-MBA. Sri Sridhara answered many questions from students and faculty on topics related to: reason for manned missions to moon and India's stand on it, challenges regarding fuels in space travel, materials, etc. Questions regarding failures of space missions, organizational challenges, economical considerations were also dealt with.
All in all, the Foundation Day Lecture 2015 was extremely well received by the audience. The lecture was inspiring and hugely motivating especially to the Student community. Rev. Fr Ajith Menezes - Director-In charge of SJEC, Rev. Fr Rohith D'Costa - Assistant Director SJEC, Dr Joseph Gonsalvis - Principal SJEC, and Dr Rio D'Souza - Vice-Principal SJEC along with Rev. Fr Joseph Cardoza - Campus Counselor SJEC, were the dignitaries present for the lecture.
Raghavendra Achar, Assistant Professor - CSE was the Convener of the function. Salma Shabnam, Assistant Professor - Mathematics Department was the emcee.