We’re privileged to live in a time where every day brings news of a new invention, where progress happens at such a rapid pace that the definition of technology has taken on utter fluidity. But sometimes you have to wonder how this is even possible, is there anything under the sun left to discover? And every time, the answer will echo out from the unlikeliest of places - ‘Yes, we are limitless’.

Today’s prime example hails from the rural town of Pallapatti in Tamil Nadu where 18-year-old Rifath Sharook is about to set a new record by launching the world’s lightest satellite. At a minute 64 grams the KalamSat - named after erstwhile President and nuclear scientist APJ Abdum Kalam - is set to be launched by a NASA sounding rocket from their Wallop Island facility on June 21. The project was chosen via a competition called ‘Cubes in Space,’ organised by NASA and ‘I Doodle Learning’ and marks the first ever instance where an Indian student’s experiment will be flown by NASA.

The KalamSat is constructed from 3-D printed Carbon fibre and the main purpose of its mission will be to examine the behaviour of this material in space. The entire operation will last about 240 minutes and the satellite will operate for approximately 12 minutes in a micro-gravity environment of space.

Aside from being the lightest the satellite packs a plethora of other features. “It will have a new kind of on-board computer and eight indigenous built-in sensors to measure acceleration, rotation and the magnetosphere of the earth” Sharook told Business Standard. The research, time and expertise that has gone into this achievement is entirely too vast to comprehend and we are certain that this is not the last we will hear of Rifath Sharook and his amazing creation.