Love for maths, ISRO job: What drove 2 women behind Sun, Moon missions

Shaji is the project director of the mission, coordinating with hundreds of people across ISRO centres to ensure things go as planned for the spacecraft travelling 1.5 million km from Earth for an unobstructed view of the Sun.

“At a time when it was not very common for Muslim women to come out and study, my father ensured that all of us brothers and sisters received a good education. He believed that women should be financially independent,” Shaji told The Indian Express.

Behind this thought was his own education – he had done his masters in maths, she said.

Shaji said she had never planned to join ISRO. It was her love for maths and physics that took her there. “I did consider becoming a doctor, like my family suggested – an engineer has to go to cities for work while a doctor can work anywhere, they said. In fact, I took a gap year to figure out what I wanted to do. I decided to go ahead with engineering because I really loved maths and science,” she said.

She studied electrical and communication engineering and decided to join the ISRO after coming across a vacancy advertisement in a newspaper. “Although I had not planned for it, I have come to love working on space missions,” Shaji said. Her mother supports her by taking care of her home when she is away working long hours.

On the task at hand, Shaji said, “It (Aditya L1) is the mission that has excited me the most. It is new and challenging. We would travel a path that we have never travelled before.”

Kalpana Kalahasti, Shaji’s colleague from ISRO’s UR Rao Satellite Centre — named after the scientist who pushed for Aditya L1 to become a space-based observatory with seven complex payloads — has also made it to the country’s pride list.

Kalahasti, 47, is associate project director of Chandrayaan-3 mission that made India only the fourth country to soft land on the Moon and the first to land near its south pole.

On the evening of August 23, Kalahasti’s mother sat with her family in front of a TV set, brimming with excitement. Like the rest of the country, she wanted to witness the historic Moon mission on which her daughter had been working for months. “She has been the biggest support in my life and supported my decision to become an engineer at a time when most women would go into banking and teaching,” said Kalahasti, recounting support of her family through her career.

For her, the popular stream of software engineering did not hold any appeal. ISRO was her dream job. She was interested in core engineering and ISRO brought engineers and scientists from different disciplines together to create engineering marvels.

Kalahasti was a part of the Chandrayaan-2 mission as well. Recounting her journey from the disappointment of not achieving the goal of soft landing to ensuring success of the next mission, she said, “When you put in so much effort into something, not achieving the objective so close to the target is difficult to accept…. But there was already a lot the mission had achieved. Chandrayaan-2 demonstrated several technologies that had been developed for it – the rough braking phase went exactly as planned.”

She said after the Chandrayaan-2 crash-landed, the teams started work immediately to look for the reasons, analysing the data available from the powered descent. Once the failure analysis was over, new teams were announced.

Kalahasti, along with project director P Veeramuthuvel, were responsible for coordinating with several teams working on different aspects of the mission. The teams worked relentlessly not only to develop a robust spacecraft, but also to test it thoroughly to see how it performed even under extreme conditions. “The actual landing was nominal, it was textbook,” she said.

The spacecraft has also “hopped” on the Moon, beginning the preparations for sample return and human missions to the Moon. The lander and rover have also been put to sleep in hopes of waking them up at the beginning of the lunar dawn.

Recounting her experience working on the mission, she said long shifts were the norm. “All the tests had to be conducted early in the morning to mimic the lunar dawn conditions to test the on-board cameras. This meant teams working overnight to set it up,” said Kalahasti.