Supriya Chakrabarti

Supriya Chakravarti is a researcher and is the director of the university's Lowell Center for Space Science and Technology (LoCSST), University of Massachusetts. He is a former director of Center for Space Physics, Boston University. lHis mainly research interests contains in Astrophysics.
Eearly life and education
Chakrabarti was born at Ramrajatala, Howrah. He completed his High Secondary studies in Science stream from Santragachi Kedarnath Institution, Howrah in 1969. He earned B.E from the Bengal Engineering College under University of Calcutta in 1975 and Ph.D in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1982. He said he was probably inspired by the small spot of light moving in the sky of Sputnik 1 in 1957. He also said that he also watched the first moon landing in 1969 on a TV through a large office window in the U.S. Information Service in Kolkata, India, and that could leave an inspiring impression on him.
Professional career
After Ph.D, Chakrabarti joined the Space Sciences Laboratory of the University of California at Berkeley as a Senior Fellow and initiated a research program in terrestrial and planetary atmospheric studies. He also participated in the space shuttle and satellite mission programs. He afterward started a sounding rocket program in Astrophysics.
In August 1992, Chakrabarti joined Boston University. From 1997 to 2009 Chakrabarti became the Director of the Center for Space Physics, Boston University. Under his deliberate direction and carefully planned strategy, the center established itself as a national leader in space research.
Chakrabarti's research group moved to the University of Massachusetts, Lowell in 2012. There the group conducts active research on assessing carbon content in forests, solar-terrestrial interactions, direct imaging of exoplanets, galaxies and upper atmospheres. From November 2013, he served as Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies in the university. He is currently the director of the university's Lowell Center for Space Science and Technology (LoCSST). From 2017, he is also serving the position of Director, Undergraduate Research Opportunities and Collaborations (UROC). He was awarded a U.S. patent for a UV detector.
During his graduate study, Chakrabarti built a sounding rocket payload for auroral studies. He also participated in the development of a spectrograph flown U.S. Air Force STP78-1 satellite, and analyzed data from this spacecraft and the UV telescope in the Apollo-Soyuz Test Program. According to Dr. Chakrabarti, PICTURE C enable us to study the disk of dust, asteroids, planets and other debris orbiting the stars and gain a better understanding of the processes and dynamics that formed solar system.
PICTURE C made its first test flight in September 2019. The 'belloon lofted camera' instrument inflates to 400 feet (122 meters) across and takes 3 hours to climb to an altitude of about 127,000 feet (39 kilometers) and then hovers. The success of PICTURE-C test launch, makes space-based direct imaging a reality and helps NASA's Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) with such technological support. The second flight will also include a microwave kinetic inductance detector (MKID) to provide spectral imaging. Other members associated with Chakrabarti in the project are Timothy Cook, Kuravi Hewawasam, Susanna Finn and Christopher Mendillo. Other collaborations were made from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Goddard Space Flight Center, Caltech, MIT, the Space Telescope Science Institute and the University of California Santa Barbara. Chakrabarti mentors more than 75 The satellite has successfully passed design review and is under the testing phase. Final assembly and integration of the spacecraft is expected to be completed by the end of 2019, and SPACE HAUC will launch to the ISS for deployment in 2020.

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