Aswin — Sekhar

Clara stood in the doorway, watching him. "He wanted you to stop hiding, Mr. Sekhar."

Previously associated with the prestigious Armagh Observatory and Planetarium in the United Kingdom.

Hailing from a small village in , Sekhar was inspired by the pristine, unpolluted night skies of his hometown. Despite a family background in medicine, he pursued physics at Kerala University and later earned his PhD at Queen’s University Belfast . Aswin Sekhar | Alumni Engagement and Philanthropy aswin sekhar

"My job is to forecast outer space particles and assess their collision risks with our satellites. We work on projects that ensure the safety of space missions and astronauts," he says. By calculating the past, present, and future evolution of meteoroid streams, his research helps calibrate risk factors for spacecraft and satellites. This is crucial for protecting expensive technology and human life in orbit.

: He completed his PhD at Queen's University Belfast in 2014, focusing on the evolution of comets and meteoroid streams under the mentorship of Dr. David Asher. Clara stood in the doorway, watching him

In June 2023, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) bestowed upon Dr. Sekhar one of the highest honours in the field of astronomy: .

Long before his name was etched into the cosmos, Aswin Sekhar was a young boy staring up at the heavens. Growing up during the 1990s in , a small town in the Palakkad district of Kerala, India, he benefited from an era before rampant light pollution masked the universe. The unblemished night skies over the Nila River sparked an enduring curiosity within him about shooting stars and planetary motion. Hailing from a small village in , Sekhar

Years later, when the maple’s branches filled with green and the pebble had worn smooth, Aswin would sometimes pause on the riverbank and feel the memory of that small weight in his arms. He understood that lives are stitched together by tiny choices: the decision to keep a stray dog, the handful of extra minutes spent listening, the bravery of letting someone else in. Memory had been a beginning more than an ending, a small, insistent nudge that taught him how to hold loss and beauty in the same breath.

While many astronomers criticize these constellations for ruining photographic images, Sekhar takes a more holistic, almost ecological stance. In his 2023 paper in Nature Astronomy and multiple articles for Scientific American , he argues that we are witnessing "the industrialization of Earth’s orbit without an environmental impact statement."

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As of 2026 (the effective context of this article), Aswin Sekhar holds a dual appointment as a researcher at the and a visiting scientist at the Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES) in Nainital, India. He is currently leading a project called "DarkHeaven" — an initiative to create a low-cost, open-source software package that helps amateur astronomers subtract satellite trails from their images in real time.