Sudden Brain Clot Claims Life of LEOS’s Scanning Earth Sensor Architect
Raghubabu Ponakala, one of the most quietly indispensable engineers in the history of India’s satellite programme, died on Tuesday (12th May, 2026) afternoon at M.S. Ramaiah Hospital, Bengaluru. He was sixty years old. The cause of death was a severe intracerebral haemorrhage following sudden collapse at his residence in the early hours of 11 May. He had been under medical care for colon cancer and was reported to be on the road to recovery at the time of his death.
Raghubabu served as Scientist/Engineer-SG (Level 13A) at ISRO’s UR Rao Satellite Centre (URSC), Bengaluru, and spent the entirety of his thirty-eight-year career at the Laboratory for Electro-Optics Systems (LEOS) in Peenya, where he was the principal engineer responsible for the design, development, testing and delivery of Scanning Earth Sensors for India’s INSAT and GSAT geostationary communication satellite fleets. More than sixty of his sensor units are currently in orbit.
On the night of 11 May 2026, at around 12:30 AM, Raghubabu woke to go to the bathroom and fell near his bed. He told his family he was alright. His blood pressure was normal. His sodium levels were normal. But at approximately 4:15 AM, he lost consciousness without any prior warning symptoms. His family immediately rushed him to M.S. Ramaiah Hospital, Bengaluru. A CT scan revealed a severe brain stroke — massive, symptom-free until that moment, and catastrophic in its onset. Emergency neurosurgery began at 7:50 AM on 11 May, approximately four hours after the family first observed his deterioration. The surgery was completed at noon.
What made his condition all the more tragic was that Raghubabu had already fought and survived a major battle. He had undergone successful surgery for colon cancer and spent four months in recovery, only for the cancer to return. He had then endured a further four months of chemotherapy and immunotherapy. He was still carrying that fight — weakened but not defeated — when the brain stroke struck without announcement, without mercy, and without the slightest warning his body could have offered to those watching over him.
Despite continuous intensive care and repeated resuscitation attempts through the afternoon of 12 May 2026, he did not respond. The doctors confirmed in the final hours that death had come from the severity of the brain stroke itself. At 2:17 PM on 12 May 2026, Raghubabu Ponakala was gone.
LAST RITES: A RETURN TO NAGULUPPADADU
His mortal remains were brought to his native village of Naguluppadadu in Prakasam District, Andhra Pradesh, for the final rites. The village, set amid the agricultural plains of coastal Andhra, was where Raghubabu Ponakala had his earliest formation — where the boy who would grow up to guide India’s satellites first looked at the open sky above the fields and began, without knowing it yet, a lifelong conversation with the heavens.
Colleagues from LEOS and URSC, classmates from the 1984–88 batch at VR Siddhartha Engineering College, Vijayawada, and family members gathered to pay their respects. ISRO’s institutional condolences, along with the private grief of the hundreds of engineers whose work intersected with his over four decades, accompanied him home.
Raghubabu Ponakala leaves behind his family, a laboratory community that will feel his absence in ways both technical and personal, and a professional legacy of unusual specificity and permanence. The Scanning Earth Sensors he designed and delivered are not museum pieces. They are operational instruments aboard active geostationary spacecraft, doing their work in the silent exactitude he demanded of them. Every INSAT broadcast that carries news into a rural household, every GSAT data relay that supports a government service, every weather image that enables a disaster warning carries, embedded in its operational infrastructure, the work of his hands and his mind.
He had begun laying the conceptual foundations for an Optical Communication Terminal at LEOS — a next-generation technology that would have given India space-based optical data links. He had written the software that automated Earth Sensor testing for a generation of engineers after him. He had trained the industry workforce that now manufactures these sensors independently. He had served as General Manager of all Sensor Assembly and Fabrication activities at LEOS. He had done none of this in search of recognition.
He was, in the estimation of his Group Director Ms. Yandrapalli Vijaya, “the person we can see in purest form,” with “zero haters in office” — a tribute that, in the fierce pressures of space programme culture, is rarer than any medal.
– Rashmi Kumari
