IIT Bombay (Indian Institute of Technology Bombay)

IIT Bombay, founded in 1958 in Powai, Mumbai, is one of India's premier public engineering and research institutions, established as the second Indian Institute of Technology. Its Department of Aerospace Engineering runs the Student Satellite Program, one of India's most prominent university-led small-satellite initiatives.

The program's flagship mission, Pratham, was conceived, designed, built, and tested entirely by students over roughly a decade, with guidance from ISRO and IITB faculty under Prof. K. Sudhakar. Pratham launched on 26 September 2016 aboard ISRO's PSLV-C35 from Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota, as part of a multi-satellite rideshare — India's first satellite built solely by students of an engineering institute.

Pratham's mission was to measure total electron content (TEC) in the Earth's ionosphere over the Indian subcontinent at high spatial resolution, data with applications such as improving GPS accuracy. The satellite operated in a polar sun-synchronous orbit at approximately 670 km altitude. The program continues to train IITB undergraduates in end-to-end spacecraft design, fabrication, and testing.