The S.K. Mitra Legacy: Radio as a Window into the Ionosphere

His pioneering work laid the conceptual foundation for today’s space-weather science. The Santimay Basu Prize, connected to this lineage, honors researchers who push the boundaries of ionospheric physics — proving that curiosity transcends generations.

In an era long before digital computation, Sisir Kumar Mitra set out to understand one of Earth’s most elusive regions: the ionosphere. With little more than radio pulses, painstaking measurements, and disciplined reasoning, he revealed how layers of ionized atmosphere reflect, refract, and sometimes disrupt radio waves. At a time when the sky itself was largely unmapped territory, Mitra transformed fleeting signal echoes into a coherent picture of the upper atmosphere, proving that insight could compensate for the absence of machines.

Mitra’s work laid the intellectual foundations of ionospheric physics. He connected solar activity, atmospheric behavior, and radio propagation into a unified framework, showing that space and Earth form a coupled system rather than separate domains. Many of today’s concepts in space-weather science - from ionospheric variability to radio-signal disruption during solar events - trace their lineage back to questions Mitra asked decades earlier, when each experiment required patience, ingenuity, and theoretical courage.

The Santimay Basu Prize stands within this lineage, honoring researchers who continue to push the boundaries of ionospheric science under challenging conditions. It celebrates work that embraces complexity rather than avoiding it, and curiosity that persists across generations. Mitra’s legacy reminds the URSI community that scientific progress is not defined by computational power alone, but by the depth of questions we dare to ask of the invisible world above us.