Join Us for an Intellectual Experience!

Date: 22th Aug 2026
Time: 2:00 PM
Location: Watsons, Indiranagar

The cost includes food & drinks.

About the lecture

For centuries, Mars has been a god of war, a source of myth, and a mirror for our own ambitions. Today it’s also home to robots we control from millions of miles away. This talk traces humanity’s fascination with the Red Planet — from ancient skywatchers to NASA’s modern robotic explorers — and asks a simple question: why do we keep going back?

Drawing on over a decade operating Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity, come hear about the day-to-day reality of Mars mission operations: how a rover “wakes up” each Martian day, how a team on Earth plans a drive across another world, and what it feels like when things go wrong 225 million kilometers from home. Along the way, we’ll look at what these missions have taught us about Mars — and about ourselves.

About the speaker

Nimisha has spent her career at the frontier of space exploration. After graduating from the University of Texas at Austin and Stanford, she joined NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she spent over fifteen years working on some of the most celebrated missions in modern space exploration — the Mars rovers Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity, along with the InSight lander, the Cassini Saturn orbiter, and the NISAR Earth observation satellite. Her work sat at the intersection of systems engineering and mission operations: the discipline of actually driving these machines and fulfilling the missions they were built for, one Martian day at a time.

She now leads satellite operations at Pixxel, a Bangalore-based space startup building hyperspectral Earth observation satellites, and is an incoming Visiting Professor of Practice at IIT Bombay.