Breaking Barriers: Meet Priyanka Srivastava, Lucknow girl behind NASA's Mars mission

New Delhi, July 27: Lucknow's Priyanka Srivastava was one of the 9 Indians who contributed in the landing of NASA's Perseverance Rover successfully on Mars.

Priyanka is a systems engineer at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and has worked on three NASA Flight Missions from design to operations phases.

She is currently working as a Project Verification & Validation (V&V) engineer for the Europa Clipper mission, helping the team build and test the spacecraft.

Priyanka was also an integral part of JPL's Earth Science mission to the International Space Station, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-3, that is successfully monitoring carbon data from space.

Prior to that, she was responsible for conducting tests on the descent stage motor control assembly of the Mars 2020 spacecraft.

She has also contributed towards the development of Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) technologies at JPL.

Before starting full time at JPL, she worked as an intern at NASA Glenn where she performed MBSE tasks for modelling Near Earth Network for the Space Communication and Navigation (SCaN) group.

Although Priyanka was born in US, she spent most of her growing-up years in Lucknow. She completed her pre-university education at Mount Carmel School and B.Tech. in Electronics and Communication from Punjab University. She enrolled herself at the University of Michigan in the United States for further education.