Bengaluru: The two vital arms of any space mission—science and engineering—are never fully aware of what the other wants. Scientists need engineers to build their tools, but engineers are not always well-versed in the scientific objective their equipment has to fulfil. At the Indian Space Research Organisation, physicist Seetha Somasundaram was their interlocutor, the liaison between the two teams. As head of the Space Science Programme Office, she got the engineers to build what the scientists wanted.
The experimental physicist, driven by a passion for gamma rays, saw many firsts during her more than 40-year stint at ISRO— the launch of indigenous satellites on Indian vehicles, the detections of gamma-ray bursts using specialised satellites to triangulate them, missions to the moon and establishment of India’s first space observatory, AstroSat. Somasundaram was also one of the first female scientists to take on a leadership role at the space organisation back in the 1990s.
Dr Seetha, as she is known, has been involved in all the ISRO missions one can think of in recent times—India’s moon missions, Mars explorations, the launch of powerful Earth observation satellites, Aditya-L1, and AstroSat.
“She was the perfect antidote to [former ISRO chairperson] Udupi Ramachandra Rao’s sometimes impatient, sometimes wild and sometimes dismissive attitude, transforming grand visions into realisable goals by working together with the wider scientific community within and outside ISRO,” says Dibyendu Nandi, head of Center of Excellence in Space Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Kolkata and the solar physicist working on ISRO’s Aditya-L1 mission to the sun.
Somasundaram does not subscribe to conventional ideas of retirement. She retired from ISRO in 2019 and holds the title of professor emeritus at the Raman Research Institute, Bengaluru, but she continues to talk about her work, traveling the country to speak with researchers and students about research at ISRO and the growth of space sciences.
“Science is exciting. After a point, while working on space missions, all differences between people, like their genders, disappear. Everyone brings their expertise. With Indian missions, we have made huge advances in research. The future is going to be very bright,” she says passionately, bringing in the importance of science and research whenever asked to speak about herself and her legacy.
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Kendriya Vidyalaya to ISRO
When Somasundaram joined ISRO as a fresh graduate in 1980, the agency had not yet launched any satellite from Indian soil.
A year into her career, she saw the launch of India’s first geostationary satellite, APPLE, and Bhaskara-1 on foreign rockets. Through the 1980s, she worked with early satellites.
As a scientist, Somasundaram was particularly drawn to experimental physics and the extension of her research— gamma rays. The timing was perfect. A decade in, ISRO had started building satellites to study gamma-ray bursts.
From the beginning, she has worked on the research part of ISRO missions.
“We were always trying to send up small science experiments that would piggyback on other missions, but once we had the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) in the early 90s, we were able to send more satellites with more instruments,” she recalls.
If things had gone differently, Somasundaram might not have been anywhere close to a satellite. She grew up in New Delhi and studied in Kendriya Vidyalaya where she was particularly interested in biology.
“I really wanted to become a doctor,” she says. “But I could not even imagine performing a dissection, which was mandatory at the time. So, I decided to go the physics route.”
She pursued a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics from Hindu College, University of Delhi, and went on to do her masters in high energy physics at IIT Madras. Then she joined ISRO. Somasundaram’s research work in the space organisation eventually obtained her a Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, where she specialised in pulsating white dwarfs.
Through the 1990s, Somasundaram was integral in building ISRO’s X-ray and gamma-ray satellites.
“I was always a fan of experimental physics even in school, and I also studied electronics, and that was very useful and quickly applied in my work,” she says.
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Looking away from Earth
The 2000s were an important milestone for ISRO and Somasundaram. That’s when she became involved in bigger projects that brought international recognition to India.
She played a major role in the AstroSat mission from 2012 as the Principal Investigator, leading its science teams. Since its launch in 2015, it has become one of the most successful scientific missions in India, producing over 300 publications from around the world with over 1,500 registered teams requesting access to it regularly.
By the mid-2000s, Somasundaram added another first to her achievements— the 2008 Chandrayaan-1 mission. She remained focused on her goal of pursuing science and research, even though the mission was primarily meant to demonstrate technology.
“From the beginning, we knew we wanted to keep opportunities for science open, and so we invited teams from all over the world to contribute payloads and scientific instruments,” she says. And India’s first moon mission did indeed carry instruments from NASA and the European Union.
When the talks for the Chandrayaan-2 lander and rover mission began, Somasundaram had become the Program Director of the Space Science Programme Office and was working on all interplanetary missions.
She recalls working on both Chandrayaan 1 and 2 along with AstroSat before another mission was thrown into the mix. Under her guidance, the Mangalyaan mission and its spacecraft came together, and ISRO became only the fourth space agency in the world to successfully insert a craft into Martian orbit on the first attempt. Her latest success is the Aditya-L1 mission.
“When UR Rao challenged the solar physics community to scale up the mission to a grand solar observatory to be located at Lagrange point L1, the responsibility fell upon Seetha to enable that vision. As Director of the Space Science Program Office at ISRO HQ, she managed every step of instrument development,” recalls Nandi.
She brought together scientific and engineering teams to realise instruments to go on the spacecraft.
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Inclusivity
Somasundaram’s style of work is focused on inclusivity.
She was responsible for bringing together a team that would build the first childcare center and a crèche at ISRO.
“It is often difficult for women who have childcare duties to spend time away from their children at work, and this facility greatly helped with that. Following our lead at U R Rao Satellite Center, other ISRO centers also adopted crèches,” she says.
It wasn’t always easy — she was one of the few women when she joined ISRO in 1980, and has seen things change tremendously with many women in senior positions in the agency today.
“It is important to have women in leadership positions to motivate and inspire younger women,” she says.
Her teams have never really been restricted to only scientists and engineers. After the successful insertion of Mangalyaan into orbit in the early morning of September 2014, Somasundaram and her colleagues joined the administrative and service staff to celebrate.
“That morning, all of us, including our drivers, had breakfast together. The non-technical staff was also so emotionally invested in the mission, and this is common across the organisation,” she says.
Her dedication to science is also evident in her approach to providing access to it. All scientific data from ISRO missions are available publicly to everyone.
“Over the next few years, we will become capable of building sophisticated instruments to carry on landers. And who knows, we will be able to determine if there ever was or is life underneath the surface on Mars,” she says with a knowing smile.
An earlier version of this story referred to Somasundaram as a theoretical physicist. This has been corrected.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)