We owe the Perseverance landing to Dr. Swati Mohan. She is an Indian American aerospace engineer, and was the Guidance and Controls Operations Lead for the NASA Mars 2020 mission. She was responsible for ensuring the spacecraft that carries the rover was properly oriented during its travel to Mars and when landing on the planet’s surface.
Like many others, she apparently became interested in Space upon watching Star Trek at 9 years old. At 16, she took a physics class and the rest is history. She studied Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University, before completing her master’s degree and Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
She narrated the landing, explaining: “Perseverance will be the first mission to use Terrain-Relative Navigation. While it’s descending on the parachute, it will actually be taking images of the surface of Mars and determining where to go based on what it sees. This is finally like landing with your eyes open — having this new technology really allows Perseverance to land in much more challenging terrain than Curiosity, or any previous Mars mission, could.”
Hearty congratulations are due to Dr. Mohan! What an inspiration to females everywhere. I look forward to seeing more women engineers stepping up in the world. You go girl!
American Airlines confirmed a pilot’s report of his plane’s encounter with a cylindrical object while flying over New Mexico earlier this week.
UFO or cruise missile ?
Thank you for reading today's post. Have an InterStellar Day! ~PrP
