Meet this Bengaluru girl who will have a planet named after her in the Milky Way

City girl Sahiti Pinagali, a class 12 student of Inventure Academy has made the country proud by joining the elite list of having a celestial body named after her. So far, nine Indians have minor planets named after them in the Milky Way.

In fact, Sahiti won this honour for her research work on our polluted lakes - "An Innovative Crowdsourcing Approach to Monitoring Freshwater Bodies," that she presented at the prestigious Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF). The ISEF is the world's largest pre-college science competition and Sahiti was placed second (overall) in the Earth and Environment Science category, reports The Hindu. Impressed by her initiative, the Lincoln Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - an authority to name minor celestial bodies - has decided to name a planet after Sahiti.

Based on her experiences on lake bodies, Sahiti had developed an integrated mobile phone app and lake monitoring kit that obtains data through crowdsourcing. The kit which includes an electric device has test strips. One can buy this kit and check water sample in a lake nearby and test the water using the strips. There are colour coded values that will determine the contamination of the water and these values can be photographed and uploaded on to the app to monitor the pollution level in the lake, reports The Times of India. In fact, earlier in May, Sahiti's work on Varthur lake had also won her the gold medal at the International Sustainable World Energy, Engineering and Environment Project Olympiad, the world's largest science fair for high school students.

Presently, Sahiti is doing her internship at the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department of the University of Michigan to better her method to detect water pollution.

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