Jayant Murthy
Jayant Murthy is a Senior Professor at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics. He obtained his PhD from the Johns Hopkins University in the study of hydrogen and deuterium absorption in the nearest stars. His main scientific interests are in the study of interstellar dust and gas through UV imaging and spectroscopy. He has recently completed an all-sky map of the diffuse radiation observed by the GALEX mission which was released to the public as part of the Space Telescope Archive.
Murthy has an active instrumentation group building instruments for flight in balloons and small satellites. All components are off-the-shelf and hence are a fraction of the cost of traditional systems. One of these instruments is an ultraviolet telescope to be sent to the Moon by Team Indus, one of the Google X-Prize contestants. This telescope will scan the sky looking for transient sources such as supernovae and other flashes.