For India’s ‘wonder women’ scientists, ‘the sky is not the limit’. Women have been playing a leading role in ISRO’s path-breaking space forays. In this chapter, ‘Crossing the Rubicon’ from the book, ‘ISRO’s Magnificent Women in Their Flying Machines, India’s Mission to Mars and the Moon’, the author captures the final exciting 45 minutes that the three women scientists experience before the Mars Orbiter Mission spacecraft enters Martian orbit

I have often claimed that I have had but one good idea in my life: that true development is the development of women and men.

—Vikram Sarabhai, founder of ISRO

24 September 2014: 6.56 am to 7.41 am IST.

It is the crucial forty-five minutes before the Mars Moment of Insertion (MOI). ISRO’s Facebook handle for the Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) had asked its followers across India and the world to ‘Be with MOM as it enters the Martian orbit,’ while providing a real-time countdown to the thrilling finale. The Mars Orbiter Spacecraft is made to slowly orient its LAM engine and eight thruster engines in the requisite direction. Its Forward Rotation started at 6.56 am, decreasing its speed and allowing it to be pulled by the weaker gravity of Mars, into an elliptical orbit around it. The burn or engine firing begins at 7.17 am and continues for 1388.67 seconds, or 23.14 minutes.

As millions watch the live coverage on TV screens, the ISRO website and social media webcasts, the core team at MOX 2 track the spacecraft’s progress on their monitors in hushed silence. The scientists’ outward demeanour remains unaffected by any nerves they might be feeling.

The presence of the official Doordarshan videographer, documenting MOM’s progress, is the first visible indication of the day’s significance. A huge conglomeration of world media waits it out in an adjacent room. The Prime Minister is seated in the VIP gallery along with several dignitaries.

In just a few moments, the perfectly orchestrated efforts of 500 scientists across ten ISRO centres, over a period of eighteen months, reaches a crescendo.

~

Deputy operations directors, Nandini Harinath and Ritu Karidhal, recall their most cherished memories in the run-up to and in the aftermath of this moment.

‘All the low-earth and interplanetary missions are tracked at ISTRAC, where there is a big control room full of terminals. Every terminal has an expert in front of it. The mission team—all of us in operations—sits in the middle circle, with assistants all around informing us about what is happening,’ explains Nandini.

‘There were a lot of long discussions and reviews on the previous day, with last-minute verifications and checking of uplinks done two weeks prior to the actual insertion,’ she adds. ‘Our current chairman, Dr Kiran Kumar, who was then the SAC director, was with us 24×7. When he starts a review, you’re going to be there in that conference room, forgetting your lunch and dinner, till late night,’ laughs Nandini. ‘Drivers hired during launch times would wake us up on reaching home at two or three am. We would be fast asleep in the regular commute from Peenya.

‘23 September was spent in last-minute rehearsals on what you should do and not do, and in planning and understanding what could go wrong. What if we don’t get telemetry—automatic recording and transmission of data? What should we do to recover and retrieve the mission? Dr Kalam [the first mission director of SLV-3 in 1979–80] visited us in the evening, personally spending three–four minutes with each one of us. Those were precious moments.

‘The reviews were conducted internally by the chairman and the project director Arunan. The checklist was ticked off. There were so many things going to happen on board which we had to clear and say, “Okay, till now we’re good. We’re green.” At every point you look for a success-crisis criteria, and then you say you’re done with this, “let’s move to the next step.” So it all went off well. The night was long and the Moment of Insertion was in the morning. None of us slept at all,’ says the deputy director.

‘At some point in the morning Prime Minister Narendra Modi came in. They had cordoned off the entire area with a lot of security. We didn’t quite realize when he arrived. He was right above us on the first floor, in the glass enclosure for VIPs. And then the actual moment when the burn started, we knew it started well because we had got the telemetry for the initial few minutes. That itself was a big thing—the engine had kicked off and was doing what it was expected to do. I think all of us knew in our hearts that it would work because we had done a four-second test burn on 22 September, which gave us the confidence that despite nine months of being idle, the engine would fire and work. This was the most critical part. In none of our earlier missions had we used the engine after nine months of shutdown—the hardware is always something that holds an element of doubt. The rest of the systems—communication, navigation, sensors—were all proven systems and we had also tested the autonomy. With software, you know how things work, so checking it is easier. The satellite then took a rotation and went behind Mars.’

Ritu Karidhal explains the MOI, the manoeuvre that everyone waited for with bated breath on that September morning. ‘All the planning, configurations and instructions to the onboard computers on the Mars Orbiter had been done ten days in advance. What time to start the sequence, what time to start the burn, where and how to rotate—the instructions were all loaded and verified as early as possible. You cannot wait till the last moment for these details. We had to depend on our ground stations for tracking, the Indian Deep Space Network’s 32-metre antenna at Baylalu near Bengaluru, and on the other side of the earth—on NASA’s Deep Space Network in Goldstone, California and in Canberra, Australia.

‘We kept a watch from around thirty-six hours before the MOI—we were continuously sitting in the control centre. Reaching 500 km near Mars was assured but then the satellite had to fall into Mars’ gravity and start rotating around it—this was the critically important 23-minute burn, to provide that thrust or push into the gravity well of Mars,’ says Ritu.

The author Minnie Vaid with Vidya Balan, who launched the book

‘And then as all of us watched in total silence, the main portion of the burn was actually happening by the onboard computers behind Mars, where we could not even get any telemetry because Mars is in between. We had to just watch without doing anything, but by that time we were confident that it will happen.’

~

As the minutes tick off on that September morning, the silence inside the expanse of MOX 2 is deafening. A rapt Prime Minister Modi watches the drama unfold in the VIP enclosure alongside Karnataka Governor Vajubhai Vala, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, several state and central ministers, former ISRO Chairman U.R. Rao and former SAC Director, Professor Yashpal.

Below them, the mission team collectively stares at their monitors, unblinking, until a few seconds later the sound of clapping rises from the first row. It grows in volume and intensity till the entire complex is reverberating.

The Prime Minister declares, ‘Aaj Mangal ko MOM mil gaya [Mars has welcomed MOM today]. History has been created. We have dared to reach out to the unknown. India has achieved the impossible today.’

The scientists get up from their assigned places exulting in celebration, congratulating each other, shaking hands and exchanging hugs with wide smiles on their faces. Seated next to Kiran Kumar, then- chairman K. Radhakrishnan is among the first to receive the first official confirmation from Mission Director Kesava Raju. The burn is completed at 7.41 am but the confirmation reaches MOX 2 around eight am.

Project Director, S. Arunan, is swamped by colleagues and peers on all sides, radiating pure joy—a man whose mission has been accomplished at long last.

By the time the Prime Minister reaches the makeshift podium in the control room, the Mars dream team is lined up in rows to listen to an effusive 23-minute paean of praise. ‘When the mission’s acronym became MOM, I knew it would be successful because ‘mom’ never disappoints,’ he says. Modi then asks schools and colleges across the country to come together for five minutes to applaud the scientists and emulate their accomplishments.

As Modi steps down from the dais, the chairman introduces the team members to him one by one, each getting a congratulatory handshake. Several young scientists request the PM to autograph the identity tags hanging around their necks and he obliges willingly, before being escorted out of the complex by the chairman.

Seetha Somasundaram, Nandini Harinath and Ritu Karidhal, their faces beaming, are among the dozen or so women scientists in the room.

~

Almost two and a half years later, when I ask the women to relive that triumphant moment, they get emotional. ‘When we got that first signal, we didn’t know where we were. Everyone was clapping thinking, okay, it has gone and it has reached. The satellite is now revolving around Mars. It was a historic moment for me. The experience was unbelievable—it gave us all a tremendous feeling of achievement. Even now, as I recall that time, I am getting goosebumps,’ says Ritu.

‘That T-0 moment is like the tying of the tali around the neck during marriage. The emotions you feel while tying the first knot, we felt the exact same emotions that day,’ Minal laughs.

Excerpted from ISRO’s Magnificent Women and Their Flying Machines, India’s Mission to Mars and the Moon, by Minnie Vaid, Published by Speaking Tiger Books, February 2020.

Minnie Vaid has juggled multiple roles over a three-decade stint in mainstream media. She is a print and television journalist, a documentary filmmaker, creative producer for feature films and more recently, author of four non-fiction books, ‘ISRO’s Magnificent Women in Their Flying Machines, India’s Mission to Mars and the Moon’, ‘A Doctor to Defend: The Binayak Sen Story’, ‘Iron Irom: Two Journeys’ and ‘The Ant in the Ear of the Elephant’.

(Mars Disc and PSLV–C25 pics courtesy: ISRO)