Anima rubishes NASA rumours

Mumbai: Laying to rest rumours of her being selected as an astronaut for the NASA 2018 mission, scientist Anima Patil-Sabale, who hails from Jalgaon, Maharashtra, on Monday clarified that while she aspires to be selected for the NASA mission, she has not yet got any call.

Patil-Sabale added that she is currently working with POSSUM, a commercial space research project, and is in the midst of trials for the latter and will be happy to share her achievement as and when it happens. Now a citizen of US, Patil-Sabale is the first woman from Maharashtra to be considered for the NASA mission. Before her, Sunita Williams and Kalpana Chawla, from Gujarat and Haryana, respectively, were part of previous Space missions.

When contacted, Patil-Sabale told The Asian Age that she hadn’t been confirmed for the Space mission. Referring to a flurry of calls she received about the same, she said, “I know of a picture of me circulating saying that I have been selected by NASA to be an astronaut. I am really super tired of clarifying over and over again that there is nothing like that (asa kahihi nahi). I have worked on NASA’s Kepler mission as senior principal software engineer and I am a scientist candidate for being an astronaut but not for NASA right now.”

Patil-Sabale sent a voice message to this newspaper saying, “I am a scientist astronaut candidate for two commercial space research projects and I am heading to Ottawa in Canada for the micro-gravity Space suit evaluation which is part of a commercial space research project called POSSUM.”

She said she would post a disclaimer on her public page denying rumours of her appointment as a NASA astronaut after she finished her mission in Ottawa, Canada, and returned to the US.