Aathira Preetharani, a 24-year-old from Ontario, Canada is originally from Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of the south Indian state of Kerala, and has been selected for an astronaut training programme at the International Institute for Astronautical Sciences (IIAS) in the US. “Though I am based in Canada, I applied for the astronaut training programme as an Indian citizen. So I will be training as an Indian national there, with the tricolour on my training suit,” she said.
