16 year old Amritsar girl bags free trip to NASA

A 16 year old girl from Amritsar has got an invitation from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and will be flying to the John F Kennedy Space Centre in the US. Hissaa, a Class X student of DAV Public School, got the rare offer after she topped the International Space Olympiad (ISO) 2020. She scored 78.75 marks, obtained collectively in the preliminary, intermediate and final test. She is the first student from India to secure this position in the senior category, and also the one to achieve it with her own hard work, without any coaching. Hissaa said, “It was a dream come true when I got the official confirmation. I aim to be an astrophysicist. I competed with students from Singapore and Switzerland, besides different parts of India, and bagged the first place,” “I got myself registered in September 2019, but due to Covid-19 restrictions, the first-round examination was pushed to January, followed by the second phase being conducted in June and the final in August. I am eagerly waiting for the situation to get favorable so that I could visit my dream destination, the NASA centre,” she added. Also Read | COVID-19: Cases in India cross 59-lakh mark, spike of 85,362 new cases She credited her father Savrajinder Pal Singh, an engineer with the MC, Amritsar, and her mother Kamalpreet Kaur, an English teacher in a government school, for her success. “Having an engineering background, my father taught me the nuances of science and my mother made sure that I get the best of knowledge in astronomy,” she added. -PTC News