The Chandrayaan 2 which was aborted a week back citing technical reasons, was successfully launched on 22nd July 2019 at 2.43 PM.
India now has become the first country to explore the South Region of the moon and the fourth country overall to perform a soft landing on the moon. Nothing would have been possible without the years of works from Muthayya Vanitha and Ritu Karidhal.
Muthayya Vanitha is an electronic systems Engineer and had the entire burden of handling the mission.
She was the in charge of data handling systems for India’s remote sensing satellites.
When she was offered the job, she hesitated initially but it was Mr M Annadurai, the director of Chandrayaan mission 1, who forced Vanitha to take up the job. He believed that her data handling skills and team management would come in handy and it rightly did.
Vanitha also played a major role as Deputy Project Director For Oceansat-2 and also Megha-Tropiques Satellites. In 2006, She was awarded the Best Woman Scientist. She was a part of Data Interpretation team during the launch of Chandrayaan 1.
Ritu Karidhal, the mission director of Chandrayaan-2 was the Deputy Operations Director for the Mars mission.
Just like Vanitha, Ritu has two decades of experience with ISRO and has been working for more than 18 hours a day to finish the project within the deadline and is called as the ‘Rocket Woman’ of India.
Ritu has a Master’s degree in Aerospace Engineering from Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru. She is responsible for the spacecraft’s outward autonomy system.
Also, this time, more than 30% of the team were women.
