Washington: When Nasa landed its Mars rover Perseverance on the Martian surface, it was an Indian-American handling the controls and landing system.
Swati Mohan spearheaded the attitude control and landing system of the Perseverance rover that navigated a particularly difficult touchdown.
The Indian-American scientist is the Mars 2020 Guidance, Navigation, and Controls (GN&C) Operations Lead. She led the attitude control system of Mars 2020 during operations. Besides that she was the lead systems engineer throughout the development.
She is the key communicator between the GN&C subsystem and the rest of the project’s teams. Her responsibility includes looking after the team, scheduling the mission control staffing for GN&C, and guiding the policies and procedures it uses in the mission control room.
According to NASA, Dr Swati Mohan had emigrated from India to the United States at the age of 1. She grew up in Northern Virginia-Washington DC metro area and later completed her B.S from Cornell University in Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering. She went on to receive her M.S. and Ph.D from MIT in Aeronautics/Astronautics. She has worked on multiple missions such as Cassini (mission to Saturn) and GRAIL (a pair of formation flown spacecraft to the Moon).
She has worked on Mars 2020 since almost the beginning of the project in 2013 and is currently working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA.
She also wanted to become a pediatrician until she was 16. It was, however, her first physics class and the ‘great teacher’ she received, that she considered ‘engineering’ as a way to pursue her interest in space exploration.
After working on several Nasa projects, Swati Mohan spearheaded one of its most ambitious missions to bring back rocks from Mars to find signs of ancient life on the Red Planet.