Bengaluru: Two decades after she first looked up at the night sky from Devanahalli, a town near Bengaluru, astronomer Ramya Manjunath Anche is set to lead a mission that will look deeper into the spaces between stars than any mission of its kind has in half a century.
Anche, an assistant research professor at the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory, has been selected as the principal investigator of NASA's PUFFINS mission, a 20 million dollar space telescope project that will study the tiniest grains of dust drifting between stars.
PUFFINS stands for Polarimetry in the Ultraviolet to Find Features in INterStellar dust. The mission has been selected under NASA's Astrophysics Pioneers programme, which supports smaller, cost-capped missions led by early-career scientists. The project received 20 million dollars in funding, announced in October, and is targeted for launch in 2030.
It will be a five-year mission: the team has just started work, and will design and build the telescope over the next four years before it leaves Earth.
The telescope itself will be remarkably small. At about 10 inches across, it will be no larger than a dinner plate, yet it will carry out observations that larger telescopes cannot. It will observe ultraviolet light from around 70 distant stars and measure how that light is changed by the dust it passes through.
By studying the polarisation of ultraviolet light, scientists hope to determine how interstellar dust grains are structured, how they evolve, and how they influence the formation of stars and planets.
The dust in question is almost unimaginably small. PUFFINS will study the smallest grains of dust that exist between the stars: particles roughly the size of a common cold virus, some smaller than 50 nanometres. These grains are invisible to most telescopes, yet they play a critical role in how starlight travels through the galaxy and, ultimately, in how new stars and planets form.
They absorb and scatter light, they help cool the gas clouds from which stars are born, and they provide surfaces on which complex molecules can form. Understanding them is central to understanding the life cycle of galaxies.
The technique PUFFINS will use, ultraviolet spectropolarimetry, has not been attempted from space in 30 years. It combines the study of light across ultraviolet wavelengths with measurements of its polarisation, the orientation of the light waves. That combination allows astronomers to infer the size, shape and composition of dust grains in ways that ordinary imaging cannot.
The mission is described as the first of its kind in the last 50 years, and it aims to decode a 50-year-old mystery about how cosmic dust builds new stars and planets.
Anche's journey to this point began in Devanahalli. She attended Oxford English School in Devanahalli and MES Vidyasagar Prof. MPL Sastry PU College in Bengaluru before earning a Bachelor of Engineering degree in electrical and electronics engineering from Sir M Visvesvaraya Institute of Technology. She is the daughter of A Manjunath, a well-known microbiologist who retired from the University of Agricultural Sciences, Bengaluru.
In 2012, she joined the Indian Institute of Astrophysics for an integrated MTech-PhD in astronomical instrumentation, guided by Professor G C Anupama. She later undertook a postdoctoral fellowship at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune in 2020-21, before moving to the University of Arizona in 2021.
She submitted the PUFFINS proposal while still working as a postdoctoral researcher, before moving into her current faculty position, and the proposal won through NASA's highly competitive selection process.
The selection is notable because the Astrophysics Pioneers programme is designed to support early-career scientists taking the lead on space science missions. Teams submit full mission proposals through NASA's Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Science solicitation, covering everything from scientific objectives to instrument design and mission architecture.
Anche's proposal survived that rigorous process to secure funding to design, build and launch the telescope by 2030.
The PUFFINS team comprises roughly 40 people, including scientists, engineers, graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. It is a joint effort between the University of Arizona, McDonald Observatory, and a network of early-career and senior scientists from universities across the world.
Two Indian institutions are part of the effort: the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Pune and the Indian Institute of Astrophysics in Bengaluru, the two institutions where Anche trained before moving to the United States.
For India, the mission is a reminder of the global reach of its astronomy training pipeline. Anche's path, from a school in Devanahalli through Bengaluru's engineering and research institutions to a NASA-funded programme in the United States, shows how family support, specialised training and research institutions can shape the movement of Indian talent into global science programmes.
It does not, by itself, prove that the system works uniformly for everyone, but it does show what the pathway can produce when its parts align.
The scientific stakes are high. Interstellar dust makes up only a small fraction of the mass of the galaxy, but it punches far above its weight. It dims and reddens starlight, it shapes what telescopes can see, and it is intimately involved in the birth of stars.
When a cloud of gas and dust collapses to form a star, the dust helps the cloud shed heat; when planets form around a young star, they grow from dust grains sticking together. By studying the smallest grains, the ones that have been hardest to observe, PUFFINS aims to fill a gap in that story.
Over the next four years, Anche and her team will turn the proposal into hardware: a small satellite carrying a 10-inch telescope, instruments tuned to ultraviolet light, and the systems needed to point it precisely at 70 stars and record the polarisation of their light. If the schedule holds, the telescope will launch in 2030 and spend five years mapping the properties, distribution and behaviour of interstellar dust.
For the girl from Devanahalli who once wondered what lay between the stars, the mission is both a personal milestone and a scientific one. The dust she will study is invisible to the eye, but its story is written in the light of every star it touches, and PUFFINS is designed to read it.
(Reporting based on The Indian Express and The Hindu.)