Irina Vyacheslavovna Rakobolskaya (Russian: Ири́на Вячесла́вовна Ракобо́льская; 22 December 1919 – 22 September 2016) was a mathematician and physicist who served as the chief of staff of the women's 46th Taman Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment during World War II.

[1] Rakobolskaya was born in 1919 in the city of Dankov to a family of physics teachers; her father had graduated from Moscow State University with a degree in astronomy in 1910.

[4][5][6] In 1946 she was demobilized from the military and finished her fourth year at the university and graduated in 1949, after defending her thesis on muons, developed under the guidance of Georgy Zatsepin and Vladimir Veksler.

[3] In 1968, in conjunction with Georgy Zatsepin, Rakobolskaya dedicated a laboratory to the study of cosmic radiation at the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Moscow State University and was in charge of it until 1991.

In 1968, she ordered the installation of X-ray emulsion chambers 60 meters below ground inside the Moscow Metro for research of the zenith angular distribution of muons.