A ‘Google Maps’ for Low-Earth Orbit?: Wknd interviews the founders of space-tech start-up Digantara

Their first tracker is now in orbit. A series of these will eventuallly generate live maps of satellites,fragments from old vessels, and debris as small as 5 cm

They spent their childhoods gazing up at the sky. Now they have a satellite out there, doing some of that for them.

Anirudh Sharma, Tanveer Ahmed and Rahul Rawat at the Digantara lab in Bengaluru. (Samuel Rajkumar / HT Photo)

Anirudh Sharma grew up in Bengaluru, the son of a DRDO (Defence Research and Development Organisation) technical officer, captivated by the air shows his father took him to.

Tanveer Ahmed, also in Bengaluru (they were classmates, in fact), told anyone who asked that he was going to be a fighter pilot when he grew up.

Hundreds of kilometres