ShaktiSat All-Girls Space Mission: 108 Countries Unite to Build Satellite for Moon Mission

Space Kidz India's ShaktiSat initiative has progressed to its second phase, bringing together girl students from 108 countries to build an engineering model of a 12U satellite prelude to a Moon mission. In phase one, a translated curriculum educated 9,800 girls towards a goal of 12,000. For phase two, over 100 students travelled to India, assembling structural architecture, solar panels, and coding rugged payloads without requiring a clean room, while learning from senior ISRO scientists. The satellite includes six payloads, featuring an infrared camera from Macquarie University, an IoT payload from Brazil, space debris capture cameras from Alabama and Purdue universities, a magnetometer from Switzerland, Poland, and the Philippines, an Egyptian drag sail designed to deorbit the satellite into Earth's atmosphere, and an AI-tested payload. The mission team has requested the Prime Minister to launch the satellite on 11 October to promote female participation in the space sector.