The engineer who helped India to reach the Moon

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Kalpana Kalahasti had a crucial role in ensuring Chandrayaan-3’s triumphant touchdown on the Moon.

 

Credit: Samyukta Lakshmi for Nature

 

“We have achieved our goal flawlessly,” said Kalpana Kalahasti, a few minutes after India’s space agency safely landed its first probe on the Moon on 23 August, part of the Chandrayaan-3 mission. “This will remain the most memorable and happiest moment for all of us.”

 

The successful mission by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) put the country in a small group that has managed to set a craft down on the lunar surface. Only the Soviet Union, the United States and China have also achieved the feat. And as associate project director of Chandrayaan-3, Kalahasti played a crucial part in ensuring its success.

 

Chandrayaan-3 carried with it the hopes and fears of a nation when it lifted off on 14 July. 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 SpaceIL, and this year the crashes of HAKUTO-R Mission 1 from the Japanese company ispace and Russia’s Luna 25 lander.

 

The loss of Chandrayaan-2’s lander was a defining moment for Kalahasti and her team members, who poured all of their efforts into bouncing back.

 

“From the day we started rebuilding our spacecraft after the Chandrayaan-2 experience, it has been breathe in, breathe out Chandrayaan-3 for the team,” she said after this year’s landing.

 

One of the biggest challenges the team faced was that the total mass of — and available budget for — the spacecraft had to remain the same as those for Chandrayaan-2. That meant the team could not drastically redesign the lander or build in many redundancies. So Kalahasti worked with project director Palanivel Veeramuthuvel to reconfigure the Chandrayaan-2 mission’s orbiter and lander. ISRO reduced the mass of the orbiter to provide the lander with extra fuel, stronger legs and other improvements.

 

“This is where Chandrayaan-2’s flight was invaluable. Its many systems that did work allowed us to arrive at an optimum Chandrayaan-3 configuration,” Kalahasti told Nature.

 

Veeramuthuvel and Kalahasti spent the bulk of Chandrayaan-3’s development time devising and overseeing comprehensive tests and simulations, such as assessing the navigation system’s ability to avoid hazards before touchdown on Moon-like terrain.

 

“The goal was to have a well-documented, well-understood system. There was no compromise in demonstrating the system’s performance,” says Kalahasti.

 

The efforts paid off. But conducting so many tests and integrating their results while also planning the flight was a giant task that required coordinating a dozen ISRO centres across the country. “It was as if we were building five to six different satellites together,” says Kalahasti. She relied on her past experiences in project management and systems engineering, including her leading roles in the development of several ISRO’s Earth-observation satellites.

 

Her leadership role on the Moon mission was a long way from her beginnings at ISRO in 2000. She was drawn to the agency, she says, by a desire to work at a core engineering organization that would leverage her degree in electronics and communications. Her first job with the agency was as a radar engineer at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, where ISRO launches its missions.

 

Kalahasti is elated that the Chandrayaan-3 mission has ignited a spark among younger people in India. “Apart from the mission’s technical aspects, I hope young professionals across India and the world get inspired by how the team meticulously emerged from failure.”

 

The mission’s success has inspired confidence in other nations and companies hoping to attempt future Moon landings, says Jessy Kate Schingler, a space-policy researcher and senior adviser at the Open Lunar Foundation, a non-profit organization in San Francisco, California, that is advocating for a peaceful lunar presence. “It’s really nice to see India coming back for a second try on this mission soon after its first attempt,” she says. “It’s such a hard thing to do, a Moon landing. So Chandrayaan-3, I think, is an appreciated investment the whole world will benefit from.”

 

Kalahasti is excited about what ISRO could take on next. The agency wants to send a mission to retrieve lunar samples, as a precursor to its 2040 goal of landing a human crew on the Moon. “Now that the critical aspect of demonstrating a Moon landing is done,” says Kalahasti, “we can move towards other capabilities.”

 

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