SPACE MISSIONS ARE NOT STUFF OF SCIENCE FICTION

As the world watched the Perseverance rover land successfully on Mars on Feb. 18, one of our own was with the NASA team: San Diego State University alumna and Jet Propulsion Laboratory system engineer Anachristina Morino. On the night before the landing, Morino, a 2017 graduate of my department at SDSU, was on console making sure that the spacecraft was healthy and ready to handover to the Entry, Descent, and Landing (EDL) Team. Then, on Feb. 18, she was in the control room for the EDL mission until the touchdown of Perseverance was confirmed.

We have now received the first audio recorded sounds from Mars, along with stunning new images and videos.

To those of us in the business of educating the next generation of aerospace engineers and scientists, stories like Morino’s help inspire and excite thousands of more students to pursue science. Morino’s rapid professional growth is both aspirational and a testimony to the immense draw of the profession: In what other field can a young professional, barely four years after graduation, be responsible for the health and preparation of a multimillion-dollar spacecraft hurtling toward Mars at 12,000 miles per hour on the eve of and during its landing?

The human impact of space programs has long served as a catalyst for aspiring engineers and scientists to pursue higher education. Just days before Perseverance’s landing, a group of Burlingame high school students asked me for a copy of a technical paper I published on optimal powered descent guidance on Mars. The students researched the relevant scholarly literature and wanted to learn as much as possible about the current research in rocket guidance — before going to college to major in aerospace engineering.

Now on Mars, Perseverance is set to use a number of cutting-edge technologies to push the boundaries of science, including deploying the first-ever Mars helicopter, Ingenuity, and caching soil and rock samples for return to the Earth. The scientific justifications and economical return for pursuing space programs and exploration have long been well-articulated.

But what hit home for me was the flawless success of Perseverance’s EDL. It demonstrated a pinpoint touchdown over 130 million miles away on an unforgiving planet. I have worked on planetary advanced EDL guidance development for 20 years, and am intimately aware of the difficulties and challenges in the

EDL phases on Mars, popularly referred to as the “seven minutes of terror.” Multiple spacefaring nations have attempted landing on Mars over the last five decades, but only the United States has succeeded (repeatedly) at achieving the engineering feat of soft-landing a robotic spacecraft on Mars in intended working condition.

A major part of our space exploration success is credited to the many trained and skilled professionals in the industry, many of them graduates of our nation’s great university programs, including those at SDSU. First accredited in 1964 as the aerospace option of general engineering and later in 1974 accredited as a degree program, my department is one of only about two dozen stand-alone aerospace engineering departments in the U.S.

At SDSU, we have a long tradition of providing solid aerospace engineering education that is well-recognized by those who employ our students. We continuously modernize the curriculum to prepare students for immediate placement in the workforce or for graduate degrees. We now offer a full-spectrum aerospace education, including six new courses related to spacecraft and space flight, including spacecraft design. Our students, like Morino, gain valuable real-world experience with aircraft manufacturers, government centers, commercial space industry and NASA/JPL.

Every day, our faculty and students conduct state-of-the-art research in EDL guidance algorithms for future human Mars missions. We are developing cutting-edge methods in computational and experimental fluid dynamics to predict the aerodynamic forces and heat when flying in the atmosphere of either the Earth or Mars. We are also expanding knowledge about combustion physics for more efficient rockets and jet engines, investigating novel structural designs to enable lighter, stronger and safer aircraft and spacecraft, and advancing theory and algorithms to help develop next-generation urban air mobility systems.

It is only fitting that one of our graduates, Morino in this case, was in the front row for the historic Perseverance landing. Just the day after the landing, she expressed: “I am so grateful for my education from SDSU and the opportunities I was presented with.” For my part, I look forward to presenting many more students with these opportunities, and to watching as our graduates push us to the stars.