Khagol 121

Ajit Kembhavi (IUCAA), and Pushpa Khare (Former Visiting Associate of IUCAA, from the Department of Physics, Utkal University, Bhubaneswar) for being the recipients of the award “Mahatma Jyotirao Phule Puraskar” (2018), for their Ma r a t h i book : Gu r u t t v i y Ta r ang-Vi shwda rdshnache Nave Sadhan (Gravitational Waves - A New Tool to Watch and Understand Universe), by the Maharashtra Rajya Sahitya ani Sanskruti Mandal, under the ca t ego r y o f ‘Sc i ence and Te c h n o l o g y ( i n c l u d i n g Computer and Internet)’. This award has been given by the Government of Maharashtra, under ‘The Late Yashwantrao Chavan State Literature Award Scheme’. Congratulations to... Welcome to... Avyarthana Ghosh, who has joined IUCAA in November 2019 as a Post- doctoral Fellow, under the SUIT project. She has finished her PhD from the Centre for Excellence in Space Sciences in India, IISER, Kolkata in 2019. She has, however, been a part of the IUCAA fraternity for a long time, because her PhD thesis has been under the mentorship of Durgesh Tripathi and A. N. Ramaprakash of IUCAA. She has been working actively on designing and performance modelling of the Solar Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (SUIT), a payload on-board ISRO’s Aditya-L1spacecraft. SUIT focusses on observations of features in the lower solar atmosphere along with the eruptive events and space-terrestrial climate with high cadence and spatial resolution. The work includes designing of filters for the telescope, which ensures optimized performance. Detailed work on the imaging and photometric performance modelling as well as the failure modes effects analysis of the instrument were also undertaken during her PhD tenure. These could, eventually, serve as abase for future space-based missions in similar wavelength domains of the electromagnetic spectrum. In parallel, she has been working on observational studies, involving both imaging and spectroscopy of the Sun’s atmosphere with existing space-based data.While the results of some of these studies lead to understanding the dynamics and plasma conditions in the intermediate and upper solar atmosphere, some serve as examples of the data that is expected from SUIT in future. Therefore, her work is an amalgamation of observational analysis along with the designing of a future imaging telescope. Combined observations from such existing and upcoming facilities will give a comprehensive understanding of the physical processes and dynamic coupling of plasma and energy in similar stellar atmospheres. She recently has won the K. D.Abhyankar Best Thesis Presentation award at the 38thmeeting of theAstronomical Society of India. She aims at extending her research in other domains of astronomical instrumentation in future, alongwith her current interest in observational studies. Avyarthana Ghosh Farewell to... SargamM. Mulay, who has joined the University of Glasgow, UK, as a Research Assistant. No. 121 - January 2020 4