Priyanka Srivastava: This Lucknow Girl Helped Take NASA's Perseverance To Mars

NASA Priyanka Srivastava: When Lucknow-based Priyanka Srivastava saw Kalpana Chawla's forayed into space, she was inspired to be an astronaut.  The Space System Engineer, went on to become one of the nine Indians who made NASA’s Perseverance Rover land successfully on Mars. In her four-year-long stint with NASA, Srivastava has worked on three earlier flight missions.

Srivastava's journey from Lucknow to NASA was not an easy one, especially for her middle-class parents. While her father works with an export-oriented company, Srivastava's mother is in the field of insurance. There was a time when Priyanka Srivastava's mother would even think twice before buying bindi for herself, to be able to afford her daughter's studies at the University of Michigan. But eventually Srivastava's dreams and hard work paid off and her parents couldn't be any prouder.

So here are 10 things to know about Lucknow girl Priyanka Srivastava who went on to become an integral part of NASA's Mars Mission:

1. Srivastava has been working as a system engineer at NASA-Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) since 2016.

2. So far she has worked on three NASA flight missions, being part of design to operation process.

3. Srivastava was also a part of the NASA mission to Mars in 2020- Perseverance Rover, operating and analysing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) system of the flight.

4. The NASA employee was one of the nine Indians to make the Perseverance Rover land successfully on Mars. Read more on her here.

5. Her LinkedIn bio describes her as a "Systems test, verification and validation engineer, working with Earth Science and Solar System Exploration teams to advance robotic exploration of Space through the development of payload and flight systems engineering technologies."

6. She has also developed a Model-Based System Engineering (MBSE)-based repository of launch vehicles with upcoming launch opportunities for NASA-JPL flight missions.

Feature Image Credit: Twitter