Hard coatings for improving the lifetime of ballbearings in ISRO Spacecrafts: Under MoU with ISRO Inertail Systems Unit (IISU) for developing surface engineering techniques for improving the life and performance of ball-bearing systems in ISRO Spacecraft mechanisms. This mainly involves the studies on appropriate hard-coatings on ball-bearing systems in spacecrafts, and to study the surface energy modification techniques for improving the wettability of steel ball-bearing systems.

Small-spacecraft Systems and PAyload Centre (SSPACE) is a center where the faculty members from multiple departments of the institute are actively involved in the development of spacecraft systems for small satellites and science payload. The core focus is to indegeneously develop subsystems for the small satellites for the On-board Computer System, Electrical Power Systems, Communication System, Attitude Determination and Control Systems, Structures and other related subsystems

• M/s Vashishtha Research Pvt Ltd., the startup company incubated under Department of Aerospace Engineering IIST (by one of our research students) has successfully developed and delivered a halogen lamp based thermal excitation system to CMSE/ ISRO. The system is capable of generating thermal loading profiles of step, sinusoidal, frequency modulated and coded excitation. The system also includes an indigenously developed lamp controller board and software GUI. It can be used for thermographic inspection of aerospace structures.

• M/s Vashishtha Research Pvt Ltd., the startup company incubated under Department of Aerospace Engineering IIST (by one of our research students) has successfully developed and delivered a 4 axis filament winding machine to IIT Jammu. The machine is capable of winding mandrels up to 1.5m long and 0.4m in diameter at speeds of upto 20000 mm/min. It is capable of accommodating 6 spools with 1.5L heated resin bath. An indigenously developed filament winding pattern generation software is also supplied with the product.

Bright Quantum Squeezed Light in IIST Quantum squeezing refers to quantum noise reduction beyond the standard quantum limit (SQL), the minimum noise limit in classical physics. In IIST, for the first time in India, we have generated the bright-entangled twin beams of light and measured their intensity-difference squeezing of 4 dB, corresponding to a 60% noise reduction from the SQL. The squeezed light is an important resource for quantum communication and quantum cryptography, quantum enhanced sensing and quantum information processing.

A common aerosol sampling inlet system (ASIS) is designed and developed at IIST to sample the ambient aerosols to characterize their physical, optical, and chemical properties (Figure 7). The developed inlet system can provide humidity-controlled aerosol flow at rates up to 38.4 liter/minute at a particle size-cut of 10 µm. The custom-designed diffusion dryer in the ASIS effectively reduces relative humidity (RH) by 34-40% on an average at a flow rate of 10 liter/minute, even under extreme RH conditions (RH>90%).

Random positioning machine (RPM) as a ground based microgravity simulating platform was designed, fabricated and validated. Experiments using biological samples proved that the achieved microgravity levels (10-3g) significantly influenced many biological parameters and the results were also compared with data from spaceflight studies. The developed RPM can be effectively utilized for the ground based optimization of spaceflight experiments. (currently under patent filing: KG Sreejalekshmi and Srujana Juratagi)

InspireSat-1 was successfully launched on board the PSLV C52 mission on February 14, 2022 and is being successfully operated by the students of IIST from the IIST ground station with support from the INSPIRE partners including LASP, USA and NCU, Taiwan, and NTU, Singapore. The spacecraft had an expected mission life of 6 months, however it has continued to work for more than one year till date [07-03-2023] collecting valuable scientific data.