Sweety Pate, student of final year Aerospace Engineering in SRM University, Chennai, and her team won the third prize in the Space Transportation Design Competition, organized by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Foundation (AIAA), USA.

NASHIK: Nashik girl Sweety Pate, student of final year Aerospace Engineering in SRM University, Chennai, and her team won the third prize in the Space Transportation Design Competition, organized by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Foundation (AIAA), USA.

Sweety named the space vehicle she and her team designed in Marathi as Nav Kshitij Vahak, a commercial earth-to-orbit passenger space vehicle. This is the only team selected from India among 100 teams from 65 universities in the world. The team, led by Sweety, included Joel Alex Roy, Anku Aravind, Jeevaraj Hejmady, Sarnavi Mahesh, Rajdeep Chowdhuri, Ravikumar Shakya and Rishabh Bana.

Sweety had earlier presented two research papers at the International Conference of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Paris, which have been published in international journals.

She was awarded by NASA for her dolphin-shaped eco-friendly aircraft working on less fuel, producing less noise, and using very short runway for landing.