The Campaign
NASA's “Send Your Name to Mars” campaign created a huge buzz on the internet inviting people from around the world to submit their names to travel aboard the agency's next rover to Mars. Around 10,900,00+ names were submitted.
Who Is Swati Mohan?
Dr. Swati Mohan is 38-year old Indian-American aerospace engineer who was the Guidance and Controls Operations Lead on the NASA Mars 2020 mission, making a personal and professional high when she landed the Perseverance rover on Mars successfully. She is one of those women scientists in India that broke barriers in space explorations.
#rockingthatbindi
A video of the moment Dr. Mohan saying, “Touchdown confirmed” was released by NASA, showing a small ‘bindi’ on her forehead. This detail was quickly picked up on and became trending on Twitter in India.
Interview Highlights
On the 23rd and 24th February 2021, in her interviews with various media outlets she shared some important highlights of her successful journey that she quoted to be as “it has really been a journey…”.
In one of her interviews with Times Of India she mentioned the reason behind the success of their mission was - “Everyone built from the strengths of one another, so the capability of the full team was more than the sum of the individual people”. “I am Indian as much as I am American"- she told Times of India, and added the strong Indian values her parents taught helped her to bring the diverse cultures in the mission together that helped in making the mission victorious.
In another interview with the Republic TV she quoted - “The landing was made possible because we have an immensely talented diverse team who all worked together to achieve that success. This type of mission is not due to any one person or any one team but rather everyone working together in order to bring their best to achieve something so great”. To her this mission gave an opportunity to bring all the pieces together from the different missions or previous technology she had worked on and put it all in one mission to see it from concept to design and finally to operations.
Behind The Scenes: Spacecraft Firing During A Pandemic
Dr Swati Mohan said that firing a spacecraft during a pandemic was “not an easy feat”. The “biggest challenge” was - because while operating so many things go on, they rely on talking to each other in order to understand the system quickly and usually being in the same room the interaction gets taken for granted but with the pandemic they really had to make sure that communication could still happen in order to assess the health of the spacecraft and understand what was needed to be done.
She further added when the pandemic first hit, they had to reimagine what that meant in terms of how meetings would take place and how they would talk to each other on conference calls if not be in the same room together as well as how to get information back and forth to the team when people were not co-located in one area. But as time passed gradually everything fell in line and in a smooth refined process helping to get the team’s rhythm back.
Lastly, she mentioned this mission will help to answer a wide variety of questions and open up the explorations. Finding answers to questions like, ‘Could life had existed on Mars in the past?’, will bring the people to understand how humans evolved and what that means for the existence of life elsewhere.
Written by - Umme-Aiman
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