Since the launch of Aditya-L1, India’s first solar mission, ISRO scientist Nigar Shaji has become the talk of the town. After her speech on 2 September announcing the mission, everyone wanted to know more about the project director. And almost overnight, the usually reticent 59-year-old found herself fielding requests for interviews.
But Shaji is quick to emphasise that Aditya-L1’s success relies on the entire team of scientists and researchers.
“Today, I can see the success of my team’s hard work of the past eight years,” she says with a smile, which is unusual for the scientist known for being on ‘boss mode’ at work. Her ISRO colleagues see her as both friendly and tough, yet motivating and approachable.
The programme director for low earth orbit and planetary missions, Shaji is in charge of all future robotic space exploration projects at ISRO.
Since 2016, she has been in charge of the Aditya-L1 mission, which will study the sun’s outer layers, plasma, and magnetic fields. To build the mission, Shaji has been gathering equipment like coronagraphs, spectrometers, and magnetometers from various ISRO centres and institutes such as the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) in Pune, and the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA) in Bengaluru. The Aditya-L1 spacecraft has seven of these instruments.
In her role as project director, Shaji served as a bridge between ISRO engineers responsible for planning and building the Aditya-L1 mission and academic scientists who formulate research objectives and analyse mission data.
“She had the challenging task of managing academicians like us who were not used to project mode deadlines. Putting together all the diverse elements of a comprehensive space observatory is not trivial,” says Dibyendu Nandi, solar physicist and head of the Center of Excellence in Space Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) in Kolkata. “Nigar was the pivot around which we managed to do that.”
But for Shaji and her team, the mission has only just begun. They are monitoring the Aditya-L1 spacecraft’s trajectory towards the Lagrange Point (L1)—a point between the sun and earth from where a spacecraft or an observatory can have an uninterrupted view of the sun. Aditya-L1 is expected to reach its destination by mid-January 2024.
The beginning of a glorious career
Nigar Shaji had just graduated from the Government College of Engineering at Madurai Kamaraj University when she learnt that ISRO was hiring scientists with a specialisation in exactly what she had studied—electronics and communication engineering.
This was 1987. Shaji, a shy woman in her early 20s, applied, got selected, and joined ISRO’s Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh. For the past 35 years, she has been helping India explore space.
Shaji quickly climbed through ISRO ranks—from a young radar engineer to managing all low earth orbit projects and, ultimately, becoming responsible for all interplanetary missions.
“My work very much utilised what I had studied, and working at ISRO was really fun and challenging. There is a lot of freedom to explore what you want to do, and I put in my best effort,” she says.
That effort paid off. After four years in Sriharikota, she moved to the UR Rao Satellite Centre in Bengaluru as a spacecraft testing engineer. Subsequently, she became head of the telemetry division and then the associate project director for the Resourcesat-2A mission. Today, she is involved with every ISRO satellite orbiting in the low earth orbit, under 2000 km altitude.
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Battling stereotypes, ‘starting trouble’
It wasn’t always smooth sailing. Shaji, like many women in senior positions in India, had to navigate an organisation dominated by men.
“Because of stereotyping and our societal culture, we women have low self-awareness about our own capabilities. We need to build a good support system because we have multiple roles and devoting time to a career is a lot of hard work,” she says.
Shaji admits she faced “starting trouble” when she first joined ISRO; she felt underconfident around her peers and struggled to assert herself. However, once she discovered this skill, life gradually became easier.
“ISRO’s work culture is very good. My bosses were very supportive, and I was able to take up the larger challenges I wanted. And now I am trying to replicate the same for my juniors and people who work with me,” she says.
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Support from parents, ISRO
Shaji was born in Sengottai town in Tamil Nadu’s Tenkasi district to a farming family. “I had a happy childhood. Both my parents were educated, and believed that women should grow up to become independent. And we [she and her brother] had the freedom to do what we wanted,” she recalls.
Her workplace, too, encouraged her to learn more–it was while working at ISRO that she obtained a Master’s degree in electronics from the Birla Institute of Technology in Ranchi.
“Aditya would not have happened without her rigour, in both quality and keeping to the very tough timelines. I have the highest regard for her and the way she managed the project,” says Somak Raychoudhury, director, IUCAA, who had worked with Shaji on the Solar Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope or SUIT.
Shaji’s colleagues describe her as a highly skilled people manager with “fire in her belly”. Her watchful, meticulous gaze took forward the idea once proposed by former ISRO chairperson UR Rao: a space observatory with an uninterrupted view of the sun from L1.
“She kept us on a tight leash, both for our timelines and budgets. Instruments that we thought might not see the light of day ultimately went through because of her,” says Raychoudhury.
While Shaji is widely recognised today for her work with satellites, she will be remembered as a key player in ISRO’s solar system exploration drive.
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Plans for ISRO
At 59, Shaji has almost hit ISRO’s retirement age—typically 60, occasionally extended to 62. However, it hasn’t stopped her from feeding her passion for space exploration. There are many more missions to look forward to, after all. If all goes as planned, ISRO will launch at least three new planetary missions before the end of this decade—a Martian lander, a Moon lander, and a Venus orbiter.
Shaji is already working on Chandrayaan-4/LUPEX (Lunar Polar Explorer) in collaboration with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and on the Mars Orbiter Mission 2 (or Mangalyaan-2), which is expected to be a lander.
“I wish there were more people like her in the scientific establishment,” says Raychoudhury.
There’s another target Shaji has set her sights on: Venus. She served as the study lead for ‘Shukrayaan’, ISRO’s proposed Venus Orbiter Mission as the moon, Mars, and other planets orbiting in the vast expanse of the solar system beckon enticingly.