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Indian Entrepreneur Gets $327.5 Million and Highest Honor from NASA for ‘Curiosity’
Entrepreneurs are usually known to be revolutionists or trend changers in the business field but we would have never imagined the business class being involved in space works, to be more precise, working for ‘Curiosity Rover’. This space machine has an Indian touch to it; Renjith Kumar a Virginia based Indian entrepreneur and engineer is the happiest person with the rover’s successful launch because his effort has been immense and this also brought him NASA’s highest honor for quality and performance, George M. Low Award.
Analytical Mechanics Association (AMA) is a Virginia based company owned by Renjith Kumar and President Hans Seywald; this company got the prestigious award for its outstanding contribution to the advancement of mastered excellence in National Space Program in USA. This award was presented at NASA’s eighth annual project management challenge in Long Beach, California.
This mission of launching Curiosity was a great challenge as it involved years of efforts and input.
When the rover landed on the red planet there were whoops of joy and celebration among people who toiled for years to make this mission possible. One of the happiest of all was Renjith Kumar who was packing off to Canada for a holiday. This 49 year old entrepreneur and his company were closely associated with the rovers Entry, Descent and Landing (EDL), which is also famously called ‘seven minutes of terror’.
AMA had a humble start. It began its operation with three mathematicians in 1962 in New York. Today this company works on aerospace engineering and employs around 250 people, this company works with automotive, defense, financial services and health care companies. The company just turned 50 years old and their great quality business has bagged $327.5 million with NASA’s Langley Research Centre. Renjith Kumar and his company have been closely associated with the Mars project and theirexcellence in quality has brought them this honor and contract.
AMA had a great challenge as it had to closely monitor ‘Curiosity Rover’ and it also computer-stimulated the complete dynamics of the spacecraft after it enters the Martian atmosphere. This involved a great challenge as it included accurately modeling the Martian atmosphere. It also had to coordinate between various parts of the spaceship such as bridles, heat shield and parachute.
“We predict what the spacecraft is going to do during the actual mission; We were also involved in the spacecraft instrumentation called MEDLI (Mars EDL Instrumentation), which will measure aero thermal environments, vehicle orientation and atmospheric density. We are eagerly awaiting data from Curiosity to do postflight analysis which will be useful for future manned missions” says Kumar as reported by Times of India.
“The mission cost upward of $2.1 billion. Moreover, Curiosity was heavy (about 1 ton) and the previous methods of airbag deployment at landing as used for Pathfinder wouldn’t work here. A new, never before-attempted idea — Sky Crane — was used for this mission where instead of rolling the rover off an elevated lander, it was attached to the bottom of the rocket-powered descent stage, and lowered directly to the surface” reports TOI as stated by Kumar.
Renjith Kumar hails from Thiruvananthapuram; he studied in Loyola College and got a gold medal for B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering and then went to Virginia Institute of Technology to pursue an MS and a Ph D in aerospace engineering.
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