thewire.in – A new video gives at times a worm’s eye view and at others the big picture of how ISRO pieced together a mission to Mars – narrated by three women who were a part of it all.
“Based on the experience we had in growing the space science community within the country, ISRO decided that we could go farther out, and go into interplanetary space and go to Mars.” These words, of Seetha Somasundaram, the program director at the ISRO Space Science Program Office, kick off a thoughtful new video about the Indian space organisation’s Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), narrated by three women who led various parts of the enterprise.
Directed by Emily Driscoll, the ten-minute video is at times a worm’s eye view and at others the big picture of how ISRO pieced together a mission to Mars in an astonishing 18 months, on a famously thin budget, on the back of the efforts of hundreds of scientists and engineers. At the time of the mission’s launch in November 2013, a now-famous image of a group of sari-clad female scientists embracing each other in celebration made the rounds online. It wasn’t simply an image of a group of jubilant mission scientists but a reminder of how few women there were in an organisation whose faces on television and in the news were almost always those of men.
