Mission to Mars
Calaveras County native is a welder for NASA’S Perseverance Rover
AMother Lode native, who grew up in Murphys and focused on Future Farmers of America programs at Bret Harte High School before he graduated in 2012, is now a welder who worked on thermal systems for the NASA Perseverance Rover that successfully landed Thursday on Mars.
Stephen Molina, 26, splits time these days between Murphys and NASA’S Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) in La Cañada Flintridge, which is managed by California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena. The lab’s employees built and now manage operations of the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover for NASA.
Molina is a sheet metal technician and works at Jpl-caltech. He did welding on thermal systems on the 2,200-pound Perseverance Rover and on the cruise stage that carried Perseverance and its 4-pound experimental helicopter, Ingenuity, from Earth to Mars.
Mars was 126 million miles from Earth when Perseverance and Ingenuity landed Thursday.
“I think the name of the rover is very fitting for everything that has happened to get this rover to where it is now,” Molina said Friday in a phone interview, speaking from Murphys. “Because of everything, the odds were stacked against us. There are multiple things that could go wrong just getting to Mars, and we beat all of them. And everything with COVID the past year, all the restrictions. We launched this during CO
VID. Over 3,000 people worked on the rover just to get it there.”
Asked how someone from Calaveras County wound up welding on interplanetary spacecraft and a Martian rover, Molina said he attended kindergarten through fifth grade at Albert Michelson Elementary in Murphys, and sixth to eighth grade at Avery Middle School. Both schools are part of the Vallecito Union School District in Avery.
At Bret Harte High School in Angels Camp, Molina said he was “heavily involved in FFA.” Future Farmers of America programs he worked on at Bret Harte included raising chickens at the school’s barn to sell at the annual Calaveras County Fair & Jumping Frog Jubilee, which he did all four years at the school; raising sheep; and raising plants in the school’s greenhouse to sell to local nurseries.
After high school, Molina went to Hobart Institute of Welding Technology, one of the nation’s top-rated welding schools, in Troy, Ohio. While he was at Hobart for a year, a faculty member attended an annual conference and learned that Jpl-caltech was recruiting welders. The Hobart faculty member suggested Molina apply.
Molina said he had a phone interview with Jpl-caltech and then did an in-person interview at the Jet Propulsion Lab.
“Technically I’m a Caltech employee,” he said. “I’ve been a Caltech employee six years.”
Molina said he could not go into detail about his work on NASA’S Perseverance Rover and its cruise stage for security reasons. He worked on the thermal systems for the rover and the cruise stage, which involved welding.
He’s proud of the work he does for Jpl-caltech, and he’s proud that he comes from Murphys and the Mother Lode.
“It’s something I never thought I would be able to do,” he said. “It’s amazing growing up here, and it taught me things I still use today. It’s exciting to see the things I work on and will continue to work on.”
Liftoff for Perseverance and Ingenuity from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida — powered by a United Launch Alliance Atlas V 541 rocket — happened at 7:50 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time on July 30.
Touchdown on Mars for Perseverance and Ingenuity was at 3:55 p.m. Eastern on Thursday. NASA’S Mars Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter are part of NASA’S Mars Exploration Program, a long-term effort to do robotic exploration on the Red Planet. The rover’s seven instruments will search for habitable conditions in the ancient past and signs of past microbial life on Mars.
The Ingenuity helicopter is on the current mission to attempt something that has never been done before: the first controlled flight on another planet in our solar system. According to NASA and Jpl-caltech, taking off from the surface of Mars is equivalent to flying through air as thin as what’s found at altitudes of 100,000 feet on Earth. No terrestrial helicopter has ever flown that high, and it’s more than twice the altitude that jetliners typically fly at.
The plan is that in about two months, Perseverance will drop Ingenuity from its belly, and the helicopter will attempt a series of about five test flights of increasing duration. If tests succeed, it could pave the way for future, larger Marscopters. Having the option of using robotic fliers could expand a space agency’s ability to study the Martian landscape in more detail, just as the transition from stationary landers to rovers did decades ago.
Friends of Molina in Murphys, Jim Riggs, 85, and Elisa Garin, 65, said Friday they have known Molina since he was an infant and are proud of him.
“He worked on that contraption that landed on Mars yesterday,” Riggs said Friday in a phone interview. “It’s just amazing coming from a small town and a small high school and going on to getting a job working for JPL, working on spacecraft. I think it’s remarkable somebody who grew up in Murphys has a job like that. Working for that company is the best job in the world. His paycheck comes from Caltech. It’s remarkable, and it’s something the whole community can be proud of.”
Garin summed up her wonder and pride in Molina’s work Friday when she said, “Part of Calaveras County is on Mars.”