ISRO Missile Women Tessy Thomas's biography | Tessy Thomas gets Shahtri Award
Tessy Thomas, the key defence scientist in the Agni series of missiles, was conferred the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Award by President Pranab Mukherjee on Monday.
Thomas was given the award for her outstanding contribution for making India selfreliant in the field of missile technology. The award, given annually for excellence in public administration, academics and management, carries a Rs 5 lakh purse, a plaque and a citation.
Mukherjee said Thomas, through her dynamism, has made the country proud and self-reliant in the sphere of security. He underlined that India neither had the intention of aggression nor to further any commercial interest at the cost of others.
In a career spanning over 24 years, Thomas has contributed in various fields such as guidance, control, inertial navigation, trajectory simulation and mission design. She was the Associate Project Director (Mission) for Agni-I, II & III systems. She has been associated with the Agni programme right from their developmental stages. She has designed the guidance scheme for long-range missile systems, which is used in all Agni missiles. Currently, she is the Project Director of Agni–IV, which is a big project with state-of-the-art technologies. The Agni-IV — with a range to launch mass ratio of 15% better than its equivalent missiles across the world — was successfully tested on
