India began its space odyssey with Aryabhatta, the first unmanned satellite built by India and launched by the Soviet Union in 1975. Over the years, it has scripted a host of records with the development of powerful rockets and satellites. And India enjoys a unique status in space technology after the success of the Mars Orbiter Mission. On September 24, 2014, India became the first country to successfully place a spacecraft in Mars orbit in its first attempt. The Mars Orbiter Mission (Mangalyaan) was launched on November 5, 2013, by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). The mission cost 4.5 billion rupees, which, by Western standards, is staggeringly cheap.
Initially, the mission was to last only six months, but ISRO extended it further and the orbiter continues to send data about Mars’ geology and atmosphere. Several women scientists played significant roles in Mars Orbiter Mission. They include Ritu Karidhal and Nandini Harinath, Deputy Operations Director, Mars Orbiter Mission and Anuradha TK, Geosat Programme Director, ISRO Satellite Centre.
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When India built its own supercomputer, PARAM, it took the world by surprise, especially the U.S. In the 1980s, India was buying supercomputers from the U.S. but it had to fight constant battles with it over license. The then George H.W. Bush administration in the U.S. denied to export Cray supercomputer to India fearing we could use it to make nuclear weapons and missiles. This forced India to develop its own supercomputer. It set up the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), with Vijay Bhatkar as its director, in Pune, in March 1988, to develop a HPC system to meet high-speed computational needs in solving scientific and other developmental problems. Within three years, Indian scientists succeeded in creating a supercomputer, PARAM 8000, with a capability of one giga floating point operations a second (1 Gflops). This was 28 times more powerful than the Cray supercomputers, India was supposed to import from the U.S. Apart from taking over the home market, PARAM attracted 14 other buyers. It set the platform for a whole series of parallel computers, called the PARAM series. The success in supercomputers catapulted India to new heights in Information and Communication Technology, space science, missile development, weather forecasting, pharmaceutical research and much more.
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