A twelfth grader from Bengaluru will get a minor planet in Milky Way named after her as reward for developing a crowd-sourced method to monitor pollution in water bodies.
Sahithi Pingali, 16, presented her paper “An Innovative Crowdsourcing Approach to Monitoring Freshwater Bodies” at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) for which she was awarded the second position prize and three special awards in the Earth and Environment Sciences category.
“I definitely didn’t see it coming. I was expecting one special award at the most. I haven’t yet digested the fact that I have a planet named after me,” she said, according to The Hindu.
ISEF is regarded as the largest pre-college scientific research event in the world.
In addition to the ISEF accolades, she also won a gold medal at the International Sustainable World Engineering Energy Environment Project (ISWEEEP) for her research work on Varthur lake.
Apart from her 9 Other Indians have planets named after them, they are-