Anima Patil-Sabale

Patil-Sabale won the 2017 Women of Influence Award.

Patil-Sabale has been involved in a number of simulated missions. In 2014, she was selected for a four-month simulated Mars mission in Hawaii, but she could not attend. In 2015, she was the Commander for NASA's HERA : Human Exploration and Research Analog (HERA) VII at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, a 14-day analog mission to an asteroid Geographos. Patil-Sabale graduated from the PoSSUM (Polar Suborbital Science in the Upper Mesosphere) Scientist-Astronaut program in 2016. In 2017, Patil-Sabale became a Citizen Scientist-Astronaut candidate for the PHEnOM (Physiological, Health, and Environmental Observations in Microgravity) Project. In 2018, she was the Crew Commander of Crew 193 at the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah. She is furthermore a First Tier Support Engineer for Hi-SEAS, a Mars Analog Mission on Hawaii. She has participated in research missions. She has flown more than fifty parabolas till now on a Falcon 20 aircraft wearing a spacesuit to test its performance. She spun in centrifuge and pulled 6G's as a part of a research study. She was in 6 inch headdown tilt position for eight hours on two separate days for NASA's Simulated Microgravity Fluid Loading Study

While still working, she started a Masters in Aerospace Engineering at San Jose State University, which she finished in 2010. At this time she also had had her second son. In 2012 she was offered the job of Senior Principal Software Engineer in Operations Engineer at the Kepler mission, a position she held for 3.5 years. This same year she also became a US citizen, a prerequisite to her position at NASA. After the Kepler mission, Patil-Sabale worked as a Software Engineer in the Intelligent Systems Division at NASA Ames Research Center. Currently, she works in the human spaceflight program at NASA Johnson Space Center as an Orion Spacecraft Simulations Engineer.

Patil-Sabale was born in Jalgaon in Maharashtra, India. As a child she developed a fascination for the stars and the galaxy when she would sleep on the terrace during summers in her hometown in India. Watching them for hours became a hobby and she wondered about traveling to them. When she was seven she learned she can become an astronaut and actually travel to the stars, after seeing pictures of US and Russian astronauts and rocketships in books at a book exhibition at her school. She obtained her BSc in Physics in North Maharashtra University, India. She planned to apply to be a fighter pilot in the Indian Air Force, despite the Indian Air Force not accepting females at that time, but she had to drop the idea as she didn't meet another criterion of having a perfect 20/20 vision. She decided that she did not want to do a MSc in Physics, but instead got her Masters in Computer Applications at the North Maharashtra University, India. It was here that she met her husband. After getting married and getting their degrees they worked for a software company in Mumbai. In March 2000 they moved to San Jose, California, where Patil-Sabale continued working in the software industry.