Hyderabad: Director of Nehru Planetarium passes away due to Covid

An avid Astronomy communicator and accomplished pulsar astronomer, she played a pivotal role in most astronomy outreach projects of the Astronomical Society of India in the last two decades.

Hyderabad: Dr. Nandivada Rathnashree, Director of Nehru Planetarium, passed away due to Covid-19. She was from Hyderabad.Till just a fortnight ago, she was involved in organising ‘Astro Adda,’ a fortnightly online discussion session with students.

In early May, she tested positive for COVID-19 which quickly overwhelmed her. She is survived by husband Prof. Patrick Dasgupta, a faculty member of Department of Physics and Astrophysics at Delhi University, son, daughter in law and a granddaughter.

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Dr Ratnashree conducted several national as well as international seminars on astronomy. During the COVID time, she emphasised on the importance of online classes for children.

The Astronomical Society of India deeply mourned the tragic demise of Dr. Rathnashree. An avid Astronomy communicator and accomplished pulsar astronomer, she played a pivotal role in most astronomy outreach projects of ASI in the last two decades. When ASI formally set up its Public Outreach and Education Committee (POEC) in 2014, Rathnasree was the unanimous choice for the first chair and she has been a part of OEC ever since.

Dr Rathnasree was a graduate student in the Theoretical Astrophysics Group at TIFR, Mumbai, in late 1980s and early 1990s, where she worked in the area of Stellar Evolution and Population synthesis with Prof. Alak Ray. As a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Vermont, Burlington, USA (1992-1994), she worked with Prof. Joanna Rankin and carried out pulsar observations using the Arecibo radio-telescope.

Soon she moved to RRI, Bengaluru (1994 1996), as a postdoctoral fellow. During her doctoral years, her focus remained primarily on massive binaries, particularly in the Large Magellanic Cloud. During her postdoctoral years, Rathnasree incisively probed a range of aspects manifested in the pulsar radio emission and associated polarisation properties.

In 1996, she moved to Delhi and joined the Nehru planetarium as Senior Planetarium Educator and became its director in 1999. For the last 21 years, she was not just the standard bearer for astronomy outreach in the national capital region but also an inspirational figure to astronomy communicators around the country.

At Nehru Planetarium she started several new activities. Under her leadership, the Planetarium became the go to place for UG and PG students around Delhi to do short astronomy research projects.

One of her important contributions was her efforts towards preservation of Jantar Mantar observatories of Raja Sawai Jai Singh and her work with students to make the astronomy behind these gigantic instruments accessible to the common public.

She also wrote numerous scholarly articles and books about the mathematics behind these instruments and shared her knowledge in various international conferences. Recognising her expertise, Archeological Survey of India had appointed her on the committee overseeing restoration of Jantar Mantar in Delhi.

Rathnasree also worked with the National Council of Science Museums to advise them on astronomy related exhibits and activities at various science centres. She was also the chief editor for class VI textbooks for NCERT.

In 2018-19, on account of Mahatma Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary, she ran an year long campaign titled ‘Bapu Khagol Mela’, where she and her team visited many of the locations where Mahatma Gandhi lived during his life and conducted astronomy outreach programmes at each of those locations.

Even during the pandemic times she was actively conducting online lectures, workshops and discussion sessions to keep the outreach going. In December 2020, she led POEC’s ‘Samanta Chandrasekhar Challenge’ at the time of the great conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter, where students were encouraged to make their own cross staffs and measure angular separation between the planets, according to Secretary of Astronomical Society of India.

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