WASHINGTON: Who Is Aroh Barjatya, Indian-Origin Researcher Who Led Recent NASA Mission

WASHINGTON: Aroh Barjatya, an India-born researcher, led NASA’s mission that launched sounding rockets during the recent total solar eclipse.

The US space agency launched three sounding rockets during the total solar eclipse on April 8 to study what happens to the Earth’s upper atmosphere when sunlight dims momentarily over a part of the planet.

Who Is Aroh Barjatya?

A professor of engineering physics, Aroh Barjatya directs the Space and Atmospheric Instrumentation Lab at the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida.

Born to a chemical engineer, Ashok Kumar Barjatya, and his wife Rajeshwari, Aroh Barjatya went to schools across India, including in Patalganga near Mumbai, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Pilani, and Solapur.

He went on to get a degree in electronics engineering from Solapur’s Walchand Institute of Technology.

In 2021, he moved to the US for a master’s degree in electrical engineering at Utah State University. He later did his PhD in spacecraft instrumentation from the same university.

“In addition to leading an externally funded research enterprise, as a tenured faculty I have mentored and engaged young minds through inquiry-based learning tactics, created a new area of concentration within the Engineering Physics programme at ERAU… My mission is to advance the state of the art in space research and education and to inspire the next generation of space engineers and scientists,” he wrote on his LinkedIn profile.