It was Swati Mohan who first delivered the news to earthlings that NASA’s Perseverance rover had successfully landed on Mars.
“Touchdown confirmed,” she announced to roaring applause from mission control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “Perseverance safely on the surface of Mars, ready to begin seeking the signs of past life.”
You might have seen her in the front row of the control room, bindi on her forehead, providing constant updates to the team as mission commentator for the historic landing. But before that nail-biting moment, Mohan had been working for years to make it all happen.
Mohan, an Indian American who moved to the United States when she was a year old, is the guidance and controls operations lead for the Perseverance rover mission, acting as the “eyes and ears” for NASA’s most sophisticated spacecraft to date.
Not only is Mohan a pivotal player in the effort to determine whether there was ever life on the red planet; she’s also a reflection of the progress NASA has made in reflecting the nation it represents.
Her passion for space started with ‘Star Trek’
Mohan has been interested in space ever since she saw her first “Star Trek” television episode at age 9. It opened up her world to the beauty and expanse of the universe.
“I remember thinking ‘I want to do that. I want to find new and beautiful places in the universe,'” she recalled in a Q&A on NASA’s website. “The vastness of space holds so much knowledge that we have only begun to learn.”
Still, she thought she would grow up to become a pediatrician. It wasn’t until she took her first physics class at age 16 that she began considering a career in engineering, which would allow her to follow her childhood dreams of exploring space.
Mohan went on to study mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell University, followed by a masters degree and doctorate in aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Eventually, she landed at NASA.
Before her work on Perseverance, Mohan was a part of space exploration efforts such as Cassini, a spacecraft that unearthed countless discoveries about Saturn, and GRAIL, a mission that sent twin spacecraft around the moon.
She started working on the Mars 2020 mission in 2013, and ultimately became the lead engineer for guidance, navigation and controls operations. She helmed the mission’s attitude control system, which helps make sure the spacecraft is heading in the direction it needs to be.
“During the cruise phase heading toward Mars, our job is to figure out how we are oriented, make sure the spacecraft is pointed correctly in space (solar arrays to sun, antenna to Earth), and maneuver the spacecraft to get it where we want to go,” Mohan explained in a NASA Q&A. “During entry, descent, and landing on Mars, GN&C determines the position of the spacecraft and commands the maneuvers to help it land safely.”
And on Thursday, she was one of two voices heard in the control room and around the world — explaining major milestones in NASA’s first mission to search for signs of life on another planet.
“I’ve been on Perseverance longer than I’ve been at any school,” Mohan told the newspaper Florida Today. “I’ve been on Perseverance longer than my younger daughter is alive. It’s just taken up such a large portion of my life for so long.”
This was a diverse mission
It wasn’t just Mohan, either.
The Perseverance rover mission was diverse by a number of measures: race, gender and sexuality. That the team behind the historic spacecraft included folks like landing lead Allen Chen, and engineers such as Moogega Cooper, Cj Giovingo and Gregorio Villar, shows it was representative of the nation’s demographics.
Photos: The best photos of Mars
Photos: The best photos of Mars
This perspective of Mars’ Valles Marineris hemisphere, from July 9, 2013, is actually a mosaic comprising 102 Viking Orbiter images. At the center is the Valles Marineris canyon system, over 2,000 kilometers long and up to 8 kilometers deep.
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Photos: The best photos of Mars
This 2016 self-portrait of the Curiosity Mars rover shows the vehicle at the Quela drilling location in the Murray Buttes area on lower Mount Sharp.
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Photos: The best photos of Mars
This photo of a preserved river channel on Mars was taken by an orbiting satellite, with color overlaid to show different elevations. Blue is low and yellow is high.
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Photos: The best photos of Mars
The European Space Agency’s Mars Express mission captured this 2018 image of the Korolev crater, more than 50 miles across and filled with water ice, near the north pole.
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Photos: The best photos of Mars
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter used its HiRISE camera to obtain this view of an area with unusual texture on the southern floor of Gale Crater.
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Photos: The best photos of Mars
Cooled lava helped preserve a footprint of where dunes once moved across a southeastern region on Mars. But it also looks like the “Star Trek” symbol.
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Photos: The best photos of Mars
Although Mars isn’t geologically active like Earth, surface features have been heavily shaped by wind. Wind-carved features such as these, called yardangs, are common on the red planet. On the sand, the wind forms ripples and small dunes. In Mars’ thin atmosphere, light is not scattered much, so the shadows cast by the yardangs are sharp and dark.
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Photos: The best photos of Mars
These small, hematite-rich concretions are near Fram Crater, visited by NASA’s Opportunity rover in April 2004. The area shown is 1.2 inches across. The view comes from the microscopic imager on Opportunity’s robotic arm, with color information added from the rover’s panoramic camera. These minerals suggest that Mars had a watery past.
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Photos: The best photos of Mars
This image shows seasonal flows in Valles Marineris on Mars, which are called recurring slope lineae, or RSL. These Martian landslides appear on slopes during the spring and summer.
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Photos: The best photos of Mars
Mars is known to have planet-encircling dust storms. These 2001 images from NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor orbiter show a dramatic change in the planet’s appearance when haze raised by duststorm activity in the south became globally distributed.
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Photos: The best photos of Mars
This composite image, looking toward the higher regions of Mount Sharp, was taken in September 2015 by NASA’s Curiosity rover. In the foreground is a long ridge teeming with hematite. Just beyond is an undulating plain rich in clay minerals. And just beyond that are a multitude of rounded buttes, all high in sulfate minerals. The changing mineralogy in these layers suggests a changing environment in early Mars, though all involve exposure to water billions of years ago.
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Photos: The best photos of Mars
InSight’s seismometer recorded a “marsquake” for the first time in April 2019.
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Photos: The best photos of Mars
From its perch high on a ridge, Opportunity recorded this 2016 image of a Martian dust devil twisting through the valley below. The view looks back at the rover’s tracks leading up the north-facing slope of Knudsen Ridge, which forms part of the southern edge of Marathon Valley.
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Photos: The best photos of Mars
HiRISE captured layered deposits and a bright ice cap at the Martian north pole.
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Photos: The best photos of Mars
Nili Patera is a region on Mars in which dunes and ripples are moving rapidly. HiRISE, onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, continues to monitor this area every couple of months to see changes over seasonal and annual time scales.
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Photos: The best photos of Mars
NASA’s Curiosity rover captured its highest-resolution panorama of the Martian surface in late 2019. This includes more than 1,000 images and 1.8 billion pixels.
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Photos: The best photos of Mars
This image, combining data from two instruments aboard NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor, depicts an orbital view of the north polar region of Mars. The ice-rich polar cap is 621 miles across, and the dark bands in are deep troughs. To the right of center, a large canyon, Chasma Boreale, almost bisects the ice cap. Chasma Boreale is about the length of the United States’ famous Grand Canyon and up to 1.2 miles deep.
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Photos: The best photos of Mars
A dramatic, fresh impact crater dominates this image taken by the HiRISE camera in November 2013. The crater spans approximately 100 feet and is surrounded by a large, rayed blast zone. Because the terrain where the crater formed is dusty, the fresh crater appears blue in the enhanced color of the image, due to removal of the reddish dust in that area.
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Photos: The best photos of Mars
This dark mound, called Ireson Hill, is on the Murray formation on lower Mount Sharp, near a location where NASA’s Curiosity rover examined a linear sand dune in February 2017.
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Photos: The best photos of Mars
Is that cookies and cream on Mars? No, it’s just polar dunes dusted with ice and sand.
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Photos: The best photos of Mars
The cloud in the center of this image is actually a dust tower that occurred in 2010 and was captured by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The blue and white clouds are water vapor.
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Photos: The best photos of Mars
HiRISE took this image of a kilometer-size crater in the southern hemisphere of Mars in June 2014. The crater shows frost on all its south-facing slopes in late winter as Mars is heading into spring.
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Photos: The best photos of Mars
The two largest quakes detected by NASA’s InSight appear to have originated in a region of Mars called Cerberus Fossae. Scientists previously spotted signs of tectonic activity here, including landslides. This image was taken by the HiRISE camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter.
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Photos: The best photos of Mars
This image is the first photograph ever taken from the surface of Mars. It was taken on July 20, 1976, by the Viking 1 lander shortly after it touched down on the planet.
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That array of names and faces is a sign of the progress NASA has made since it was founded in 1958. White men were long seen as the face of the space exploration program, despite significant contributions from women and people of color over the years. The agency had only ever selected White men as astronauts until 1978, when it admitted a class that included the first female, first African American and first Asian American astronauts.
There is still progress to be made, but NASA’s workforce now looks much more like the nation.
Of the more than 17,000 people who work for NASA, 72% are White, 12% are Black, 8% are Asian American or Pacific Islander, 7% are Hispanic or Latino, 1% are American Indian or Alaska Native and less than 1% are more than one race, according to agency data.
