Reaching for the stars: The Rocket women of ISRO

11^TH of February is celebrated as the International Day of Women and Girls in Science and encouraging female enrolment in STEM (Science, Technology, and Engineering and Mathematics) fields. According to the report of World Bank, women rate nearly 43% of total STEM graduates in India, one of the highest in the world.

Today, more than 16,000 women work at the Indian Space Research Organization. They are mission directors, project managers and system engineers. They code autonomy system that operates satellites millions of kilometers from Earth and yet, for most of India, their names remain unknown, here is a look into some prominent women who, exactly, behind the spacecraft.

1. Kalpana Kalahasti

On August 23, 2023, when the Vikram lander touched down on the Moon’s south pole and India erupted in celebration, one of the most radiant smiles in ISRO control room belongs to Kalpana K. The team of five, and among them is Kalpana Kalahasti, the associate project director of Chandrayaan-3. She is an Aerospace engineer, served as the deputy project director of the Chandrayaan-3 mission where her major role in designing and optimizing the lunar lander systems. Her unwavering dedication ensured the mission’s continuity, even in the face of challenges posed by the pandemic. She said at the interview that “this will remain the most memorable and happiest moment for all of us.”

Born in Taduka Village in the Tirupati district of Andhra Pradesh, Kalpana completed her graduation in Electronics and communication Engineering from Madras University, Chennai. In 2000, she joined ISRO through a meticulous selection process. Her career began as a radar engineer at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SHAR) in Sriharikota, working on launch vehicle systems. In 2005, she moved to the U.R. Rao Satellite Centre in Bengaluru- and that is where her career truly ignited. She joined ISRO in 2003, working on multiple satellite projects Kalpana Kalahasti’s responsibilities ranged from enhancing propulsion systems to ensure precise satellite placement. She was in charge to capture high-resolution images of Earth’s surface. Her achievements have earned her several awards including ISRO Team Excellence Award in 2019.

2. Ritu Karidhal

Ritu Karidhal was born in Lucknow, as a little girl who spent her evenings gazing at the night sky for hours and thinking about outer space, she wondered about the moon, as how it changes its shape and size, cutting out newspaper articles about ISRO and NASA, and asking questions that nobody around her could answer. She went on to complete her B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Physics from the university of Lucknow, then pursued her MTech in Aerospace Engineering from the prestigious Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru. She joined ISRO in 1997 and never looked back.

Decades later, Dr. Ritu Karidhal Srivastava popularly referred as the “Rocket Women of India”.  she played a key role in the development of India’s Mars Orbiter Mission, Mangalyaan. she became the Deputy Operations Director for Mangalyaan- India historic Mars Mission- designing the autonomy system that led the spacecraft which operated functions independently in space and responded appropriately to malfunctions. This mission made India the fourth country in the world to reach Mars.  She severed as the Mission Director for Chandrayaan-2 mission.

In 2021, when the United Kingdom assumed presidency of the G7, Ritu Karidhal was appointed by the country’s Minister of Women and Equalities Liz Truss to a newly formed Gender Equality Advisory Council (GEAC) chaired by Sarah Sands. Ritu Karidhal received the ISRO Young Scientist Award in 2007 from Missile man A.P.J. Abdul Kalam. She received the UP Gaurav Samman Award from Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath in 2024.

3. Muthayya Vanitha

If science had a quiet superpower, it would look like Muthayya Vanitha. Muthayya Vanitha is from Chennai originally trained as a designer engineer. She completed her school in in Boiler plant school Trichy and graduated from College of Engineering, Guindy.

She joined ISRO as a junior engineer working in various areas of hardware testing and development and rose to become the first women ever to serve as Project Director at ISRO. She led Chandrayaan-2 overseeing the spacecraft’s design and launch. Her specialization- satellite data handling, telemetry, and telecommand divisions- sits at the invisible backbone of every mission, making sure that the information flows correctly between Earth and spacecraft in the unforgiving silence of space. Her responsibilities include ensuring complete oversight of the development and implementation of all system and acting as a point of authority for the project.

In 2019, as Chandrayaan-2 lifted off, the world finally began to see what ISRO had known for decades: that Muthayya Vanitha was not just a first- she was a force. She was awarded as Best Woman Scientist Award by the Astronomical Society of India in 2006. She was also noted as one of five scientists to watch by Nature in 2019.

4. Rima Ghosh

Rima Ghosh hails from Asansol, West Bengal, a quiet, small-town girl who went on to touch the moon. Rima Ghosh is a robotics specialist who was associated with the development of the Pragyan rover. Working at ISRO’s U.R. Rao Satellite Centre in Bengaluru, she specializes in satellite attitude control, space robotics and planetary rover technology. She also experienced in various aspects of exploratory rovers starting from autonomous path planning, Terr mechanics, inverse kinematics etc. Her most significant contribution has been to the chandrayaan-3 Pragyan rover. As Pragyan rover rolled out of Vikram lander and took a walk on the moon on August 23, Rima Ghosh, expressing her happiness, she said that “she felt like her baby is taking baby steps on the Moon”.Her work on visual odometry using stereo images from the Pragyan rover has been referenced in joint research to improve how rovers track their position and move through tough terrain.

Speaking on future plans of the ISRO, she said, "Definitely, we will come up with something even better. We are very excited as the Aditya-L1 (ISRO's solar mission) will be launched. We will embrace more challenging missions".

Rima is a reminder that India’s space triumphs are built not just in mission control rooms, but in the patient, precise, and deeply technical work of engineers who make rovers think, move, and survive on another world.

They prove that India’s greatest achievements have always had women in the room, even when the cameras did not find them.