Nandini Harinath

Full transcript

Hello everyone, welcome to the fifth episode of the Beyond the Blueprint podcast. Today we have an aerospace engineer to give us a little insights about what she does in the, you know, the life, day in the life maybe of what an aerospace engineer is. So David, first question. Yeah, so my first question is, what inspired you to become a space scientist?

Was there something in your childhood or a school that made you interested in space? Or was it something more general? So hello everyone and my best wishes to everyone who's listening. I am Nandini Harinath and I work for Indian Space Research Organization and I take care of tracking and control of all of India's lowered satellites and interplanetary missions.

So that's about me. Let me first answer David's questions. And yeah, you know, as a child and as a family, we were all very much interested in space. I remember my father helping me to identify the constellations in the sky when I was a kid.

I'm a big fan of Star Trek. And those times we had Dr. Spock and Captain Kirk. I don't know if this generation knows them.

And I also remember as a kid watching the solar eclipses through a pinhole camera projected on the walls of our house. So there were many incidents and we were generally curious as kids. and my parents were interested in science too. So it was a lot of science at home and in the family.

Thank you. What was your role in the Mars Orbiter mission and what kind of work did you do for it? So I was designated as project manager, mission design. and Deputy Operations Director for the Mars Orbiter Mission.

And so my job started right from the time the project was conceived. You know, it started from what kind of satellite do you want to fly? What would be the trajectory to Mars? What kind of orbit will it go in when it is around Mars?

And I was also in charge of coordinating with all the principal investigators for the payloads, people who developed instruments that would look for signs around Mars. And so my job was to ensure that their requirements were met. I'll just give you an example. You know, if you're flying in an orbit and at some point of time when the satellite would go behind Mars and would be occulted by the sun, it would not get solar energy from the sun.

So what kind of battery would you fly and what geometry would give you a power generation capability to satisfy the requirements of the instruments and the satellites itself? So, you know, these were the kind of studies that we did in the initial part of the mission. But as the scientists and engineers kept building the satellite, our role more came from mission designers to planners to people who actually executed the mission. So I was in charge of carrying out all the operations on the satellite right from the time it was launched till it reached the Mars orbit and till it collected data.

In fact, till the end of the life of the mission. I see. Those are some interesting works. So my next question is, what is a normal day an ISRO look like for you?

Okay, so I am in right now in the heading the mission operations team. So my team and my job is to take care of all the satellites. We are more like, you know, doctors attending to patients. But in this case, the satellites need some kind of, we call it housekeeping.

We look at the telemetry and then we upload commands for the next day. We track the satellite. We determine the orbit of the satellite. You know, these satellites, because of the Earth's gravity and various perturbation forces, keep decaying.

And we need to ensure that they are in their orbital slot and yeah and once in a way you way these satellites can also have problems like we humans do So there could be a failure somewhere There could be a problem somewhere in the ground segment. So we attend to these issues. So basically, our job is to keep all the satellites in their place and keep them up and kicking. Good, thank you.

so what were some of the hardest problems you and your team faced during the Mars mission and how did you solve them so the Mars mission is challenging you know for one reason that we are the satellite is going around the planet and which is distant from the earth and And the farthest it can be is 400 million kilometers. So even with the speed of light, it would take 22 minutes for light to reach the satellite and come back, for a signal to reach the satellite. And then you take another 22 minutes for us to get the data from the satellite. So one of the things as designers we had to do was to ensure that we program everything on the satellite much before we plan for the events to occur nominally ahead of time.

And then upload it on the satellite and have enough autonomy on the satellite to ensure that it can execute all the events that we wanted to do. but then the problem is the most challenging part is what if something goes wrong on the satellite how does the satellite take care of itself so all this also had to be pre-programmed in the software and the hardware so that the the satellite would be able to take care of it of itself on its own under all circumstances so this was one of the biggest challenge because of the, we call it the communication delay. And the next thing was, you know, the communication itself. To talk to the satellite, which is so far off, and then there's this gamut of radiation between us and the satellite.

So you need to have antennas and receivers, which are extremely sensitive, to pick up the small bit of signal amongst this whole gamut of noise. so the receiver sensitivity the communication and then the navigation itself how do you reach a planet which is so distant away and ensure that your maneuvers or the trajectory towards the satellite is so precise that you keep you know determining the position of the satellite at every instant and you have to make sure that it is on its track and they're very sophisticated methods to do that to develop all those technologies and then to ensure that the satellite gets captured into the mars orbit you know it has to leave the earth orbit and it has to go towards mars and then it has to do a maneuver to get captured into the mars orbit so that it goes around Mars. So all these were extremely difficult and challenging. And I think the most challenging part there was that we were doing it for the first time.

So everything that we did was new and we didn't have an experience on that. So to learn and to do it and be executed perfectly, I think that was more satisfying. I see. That was really cool.

I was also on your Wikipedia page earlier, and I noticed that you wrote a book about mission planning. How do you start planning something as big as a Mars mission? so yeah so it was a paper and yeah we we've had many papers on the work we do published in various journals and planning is a very key and essential part of our work and so as a mission planner you need to take care of every subsystem in the satellite every part of the satellite, the constraint the subsystem poses when it's in orbit. You need to take care of those constraints.

You need to know how each and every payload is operated. You need to know how each and every subsystem can be operated. You know, to design it as one part and to know and to plan for its operation is another part. Let me give you an example on the Mars mission So there was a color camera and the requirement of the color camera was to look at the Mars surface so that it could take pictures But there was another payload which wanted to look at the limb of the Mars surface, not the center of the Mars limb.

so there was another payload which wanted to look at the ram axis of the orbit so that it could collect enough you know data while it is moving in the velocity direction so each of this instrument posed conflicting requirements so the basically you need to plan out in such a way that you give enough time for each of the instruments and you don't violate any restrictions posed by any of the instruments. So this requires a lot of work and a lot of coordination between the teams and of course you know finally these plans are translated into operations and then we carry out these operations on the mission. Thank you. So I was wondering what school subjects and skills you think is most helpful if someone wants to work in space science or engineering?

So the advantage I'll tell you with working in space or anything related to space science is that it's multidisciplinary. You could be an engineer building the satellite. You could be a mechanical engineer, electronics engineer, a control systems engineer, an aerospace engineer. Any type of an engineer would actually find a job in an organization that works in space.

So it's not just this. You could be interested in astronomy. You could be interested in studying the celestial objects. you could be interested in astrophysics you know learning the physics of how the universe was made learning more about the stars learning more about our planets and galaxies you could even be a doctor because you know now that so many astronauts going to space there is an entire new brand called space medicine so you could be a doctor and specialize in space medicine and work with astronauts.

You could be a planetary scientist. And then there's something very, very, very diverse. You could be a lawyer and still work in a space organization because nowadays there's something called space policy and law. It's a legal body that regulates all aspects of the space exploration.

So you see, it's extremely diverse. You could be interested in any of these fields and still work in space. That's cool. So my next question is, the Mars Orbiter mission cost much less than other countries' missions.

How did your team keep costs low but still succeeded? okay so um a lot of it was because the entire satellite was built in-house with indigenous technology we didn't have to buy anything from an organization outside of ISRO so most of the very critical components that we used in the mission was built indigenously and that drastically reduced the cost. And the other aspect was, you know, the mission management, the whole planning that I talked about, it was done in such a way so that we could prove ourselves, we could establish the technology, but at the same time ensure that we kept the cost extremely low. So I think these were two key important factors that helped to bring down the cost.

Okay, yeah. So do you work closely with other teams or departments and how important is teamwork at ISRO? Yeah, so, you know, like they say, teamwork makes dreams work. Especially the area that I work in, the mission planning and operations, it's always about teamwork.

Every person in the team has to play his role to perfection for a mission to succeed. And as you all know, space is unforgiving. You cannot afford to have a single mistake anywhere in the onboard systems or in the ground systems. Space is zero tolerant to errors.

So when you are working in such a situation you have to ensure that everyone works in a very cohesive way And for that working as a team is extremely important And this team is not just a small team. It involves a few hundreds of people who design the satellite, people on the ground who are working on the antennas and the ground data systems, people who are working on the software, people who are working on the hardware, people who are working on operations. Everyone has to work together cohesively with one single objective and stay aligned with the goal for the mission to succeed. So especially, I'd reiterate again, if you're working on a satellite or on a space mission, teamwork is extremely important.

there's no job that you could do alone and say, I can take the credit for this mission. There is no such thing at all. It's always a teamwork. I see.

So my next question, I'm sure a lot of students like us will wonder about. It is, what advice would you give to high school students who dream of working in space, especially if they feel unsure or face challenges? so I think life is all about facing challenges and tackling challenges and and it's also about getting out of the comfort zone let's say you like a particular subject but you find it hard but it's it's all about you know strengthening the areas where you think you're not very strong so you need to essentially come out of that comfort zone and if you want to do i can talk about space sciences so basically you need to you need to find avenues where you can gain some experience in the field that you like and then you develop your technical skills in that particular area i think for students like you the most important thing is to stay connected, stay networked and stay informed. You know, the technology is changing so fast.

It's always good to stay informed, you know, attend conferences, listen to podcasts, do whatever you're doing right now. I think that's a wonderful idea. And then consider different career paths, like find out what is going to be the best for you, what is your dream job, And then prepare for the challenges, you know, while you plan for it. I think the most important thing at the end of it all is to stay persistent.

Sounds cliche, but I think that is the key. To stay, you know, perseverance is the key for any success. In fact, not only just for students, even for scientists like us. we see failures day in and day out but then to stay persistent and you know learn from what from your experiences is and to do things better next time is the key to success Thank you, I think that's really good advice that we both hear and everyone else needs to hear.

So for our final question, what exciting projects or future missions are you working right now or looking forward to? Yes, I mean, all of you must have read in the papers that India is planning to put a man in space through an indigenous spacecraft. So we are all working on that. So we hope to see that happen soon.

We're going to have a launch of a mission called Nisar. And I don't know if you all heard about it. So ISRO is working with NASA, JPL on a collaborative project. And we're working together with the JPL team.

And you'll probably be hearing about the launch and the satellite operations very soon. I hope that happens quickly in the next few months. Of course, ISRO has long-term plans of reaching various planets, maybe the Venus and other missions. So we have a couple of missions to the moon.

And yeah, the list goes on. So right now it's all about looking forward to the mission with NASA and our human space program where we want to put a man in space. Thank you. Thank you for all the valuable insight you just gave us.

And that was our last question. So I just want to thank you for your time. and as we enter. Yes, and go on your mission.

And then, yeah, thank you for having me and I wish you all the best and I hope you all reach out to the stars. Thank you.