Soon after the successful liftoff of Aditya-L1 from Sriharikota on Saturday morning, project director Nigar Shaji, who has been handling this complex mission for the last eight years, thanked Isro chairman S Somanath and directors for trusting her team. “I feel really honoured and privileged to be part of this mission. It is a dream come true for Team Aditya-L1. Aditya-L1’s solar panels have now been deployed and the spacecraft has started its 125 days of long journey to L1 (point),” she said, adding, “Once the Aditya L1 is commissioned, it will be an asset for heliophysics as well as for the global scientific fraternity.”
Remembering the contribution of former Isro chairman Prof Udupi Ramachandra Rao, affectionately called the father of India’s satellite programme, in whose name the Bengaluru satellite centre has been rechristened, Shaji said, “I would like to remember our great scientist, Prof U R Rao who sowed the seed for this mission.” She also thanked the expert committee that has been guiding the project team throughout the mission.
A native of Tamil Nadu, the 59-year-old Shaji did her schooling from a government school there and stood district first in 10th and school first in 12th standard. After her engineering degree from a college in Tirunelveli, Shaji completed M.Tech from Birla Institute of Technology, Ranchi, and joined Isro in 1987.
Hailing from Tamil Nadu’s Tenkasi, Shaji joins a list of illustrious names from the state — Mayilsamy Annadurai, M Vanitha and P Veeramuthuvel, who had helmed the country’s three lunar missions. Shaji, during her 35-year stint in Isro, had earlier made immense contributions to Indian remote sensing, communication and interplanetary satellite programmes at various responsibilities. She was also the associate project director of Resourcesat-2A, which is the Indian Remote Sensing Satellite for National Resource Monitoring and management and had authored several papers on image compression and system engineering.
Like Shaji, Kalpana K, as deputy project director of the Chandrayaan-3 mission, meticulously oversaw the intricate details of India’s third lunar project. Her prior experience included contributions to India’s second lunar mission and Mangalyaan mission.
Before her, M Vanitha was project director and Ritu Karidhal Srivastava mission director of the Chandrayaan-2 mission, which was launched in 2019 under the then chairman K Sivan. Before heading the Moon mission, Vanitha had also worked as the deputy project director for TTC-baseband systems for Cartosat-1, Oceansat-2 and Megha-Tropiques satellites, while Ritu Karidhal, who hails from Lucknow, was the deputy operations manager for Mangalyaan and had received the Isro Young Scientist Award in 2007.
Besides the leading roles, scores of women are working at various subordinate levels in almost all Isro missions. According to one estimate, around 20-25% of the space agency’s over 16,000 employees are women.
PM Modi, during his visit to the Isro centre Istrac in Bengaluru on August 26 soon after India’s successful soft-landing on Moon, interacted with these women scientists and thanked them for “taking Isro to new heights”.
