Perseverance pays off for US Indian
NASA SCIENTIST SWATI MOHAN REVEALS HER PRIDE IN MARS MISSION AND STAR TREK’S PIVOTAL ROLE
AN INDIAN AMERICAN scientist played a key role behind the historic landing of NASA’s Perseverance rover on the Martian surface.
Swati Mohan, who led the guidance, navigation, and control operations of the Mars 2020 mission, cheered last Thursday (18) when the rover landed on Mars after seven months in space.
“Touchdown confirmed,” said Mohan at 3:55 pm Eastern Time (2055 GMT), at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
Mohan, whose family emigrated from India to the US when she was just one year old, also confirmed that the rover had survived a tricky plunge through the Martian atmosphere.
Raised in Northern Virginia and the Washington DC metro area, Mohan completed her bachelor’s degree from Cornell University in mechanical and aerospace engineering, and her MS and PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in aeronautics/astronautics.
She had worked on the Cassini mission to Saturn and GRAIL – a pair of formation flown spacecraft to the moon – and has been a mainstay with the Mars 2020 mission since its inception in 2013.
Mohan said her interest in space was piqued after watching the popular TV cult classic Star Trek when she was nine..“Seeing the beautiful depictions of the new regions of the universe they were exploring, I want to do that. The vastness of space holds so much knowledge that we have only begun to learn,” she said.
“I was lucky enough to have a great teacher, and that was when I really considered engineering, as a way to pursue space.”
Talking about the mission, Mohan said during the cruise phase heading towards Mars, the team’s job was to figure out how the spacecraft was oriented, and to make sure it was pointed correctly in space.
“As the team’s operations lead, I am the primary point of communication between the guidance, navigation, and control (GN&C) subsystem and the rest of the project. I am responsible for the training of the GN&C team, scheduling the mission control staffing for it, as well as the policies and procedures used in the mission control room,” she said.
Over the coming years, Perseverance will attempt to collect 30 rock and soil samples in sealed tubes, to be sent back to earth some time in the 2030s for lab analysis.
It will begin drilling its first samples in the summer, and will deploy new instruments to scan for organic matter, map chemical composition and zap rocks with a laser to study the vapour. Scientists believe that around 3.5 billion years ago, the crater was home to a river that flowed into a deep lake, depositing sediment in a fan-shaped delta.
The rover is only the fifth ever to land on Mars. The feat was first accomplished in 1997, and all of them have been American.