From Bengaluru to the Milky Way—how this 12th grader got a planet named after her

From Bengaluru to the Milky Way—how this 12th grader got a planet named after her.
A 12th-grade student who presented an award-winning paper on how to tackle those little specks of froth that are manifestations of the pollutants in our lakes now has a little speck in the infinite universe named after her.
Meet Sahithi Pingali, a student at Inventure Academy, Bengaluru.
Here’s how she became one of the gifted few individuals whose roles in the advancement of the world led to minor planets in our galaxy, the Milky Way, being named after them.
Of the 21 awards won by the Indian contingent, three were bagged by her alone.
She is now interning at the Civil & Environmental Engineering Department of the University of Michigan, which will further help her in her research surrounding water pollution.
“I definitely didn’t see this coming.
I want to make (my research) more accurate and expand it to detect arsenic,” she told The Hindu.
Last December, she won the Grand Award at the IRIS Science Fair in Pune for her paper titled “A New Approach to Monitoring Lakes in Developing Countries: Crowdsourcing Environmental Science,” and more recently, she took home the gold medal at the International Sustainable World Engineering Energy Environment Project (ISWEEEP) Olympiad in Houston for her study on Varthur Lake.
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