Meet Ritu Karidhal Srivastava, the scientist behind ISRO's Chandrayaan-3

Ritu Karidhal Srivastava is a senior scientist at ISRO and was the Deputy Operations Director to India's Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), Mangalyaan. (Image: Twitter)

India’s third lunar mission, Chandrayaan-3, is all set to launch from Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Andhra Pradesh’s Sriharikota at 2.35 pm today. The woman behind the mission, Ritu Karidhal Srivastava is a scientist at the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and is also known as India’s “rocket woman”.

So, who is Ritu Karidhal Srivastava? Read on further to find out more about her.

Srivastava is a senior scientist at ISRO and was the Deputy Operations Director to India's Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), Mangalyaan.

She was born and brought up in Lucknow and did MSc in Physics from Lucknow University in 1996. She also pursued MTech from the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bengaluru.

According to the World Economic Forum (WEF), Srivastava joined ISRO in 1997. She also received the ‘ISRO Young Scientist Award’ by former President APJ Abdul Kalam. In addition, she received the ‘ISRO Team Award for MOM in 2015’, ‘ASI Team Award’ and ‘Women Achievers in Aerospace, 2017’ by Society of Indian Aerospace Technologies & Industries (SIATI).

As per WEF, Srivastava was fascinated by space at a very young age and developed an interest in exploring it. She used to collect news articles related to any space activities by ISRO or American space agency NASA as a hobby during her school days.

She has published more than 20 papers both in International and National Publications and has worked for many prestigious missions of ISRO.

The live launch of Chandrayaan-3 can be watched from ISRO’s social media channels and DD National from 2 pm.