Associate project director of Chandrayaan Kalpana Kalahasti, an engineer who ensured Chandrayaan -3’s triumphant touchdown on Moon  and helped India to reach the Moon. She said after a few minutes India’s space agency safely landed its first probe on the Moon on 23 August,  “We have achieved our goal flawlessly, this will remain the most memorable and happiest moment for all of us”.

Only the Soviet Union, the United States and China have also achieved this feat.

Chandrayaan-3 carried lifted off on 14 July, as India’s previous attempt to reach the lunar surface, the Chandrayaan-2 mission in 2019, ended in failure when the lander crashed. Three other Moon missions had similar fates, the 2019 loss of the Beresheet lander built by Israeli company Spacell, and this year the crashes of Hakuto- R Mission 1 from the Japanese company ispace and Russia’s Luna 25 lander.

After the loss of Chandrayaan-2 lander, Kalahasti and her team members had focused all their efforts to bounce back saying “From the day we stated rebuilding our spacecraft after the Chandrayaan-2 debacle, it has been breathe in, breathe out Chandrayaan-3  for the team”. As the budget for spacecraft had to remain the as those for Chandrayaan-2, the team could not drastically redesign the lander or build in many redundancies. Kalahasti worked with Project Director Palanivel Veeramuthuvel to reconfigure the Chandrayaan-2 mission’s orbiter and lander. ISRO reduced the mass of orbiter to provide the lander with extra fuel, and stronger legs. Kalahasti said “ we learned a lot from Chandrayaan-2’s flight failure, although it had many systems that did work immaculately which allowed us to arrive at an optimum Chandrayaan-3 configuration. Chandrayaan-3 was put to comprehensive tests and simulations, such as assessing the navigation system’s ability to avoid hazards before touchdown on Moon like terrain. These efforts paid off.  But conducting many tests and integrating their results while also planning the flight was a giant task that required ultimate coordinating  a dozen ISRO centres across the country, as if we were building five to six different satellites together”.

Her degree in electronics and communications,  helped her to start as a radar engineer at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota where ISRO launches its missions.

She also said “ Young professionals across India and the world get inspired by how the team meticulously emerged from failure, a stepping stone to success”.