Dr Swati Mohan Has Made Us Proud: Spent 8 Years On NASA Perseverance Mars Landing

NASA’s Perseverance Rover and Ingenuity helicopter have successfully landed on Mars, making all of humanity proud here on Earth.?

And this lady's image you see below -- NASA's Dr Swati Mohan -- she had a huge part in ensuring the Perseverance rover landed safely on Mars.

NASA

After an almost?seven-month-long journey?to Mars and its unique challenges -- nothing came in the way of the ?state of the art guidance and navigation system that NASA had put at play here. And the person responsible to help Perseverance and Ingenuity land safely on Mars is NASA's Dr Swati Mohan -- Mars 2020 Guidance, Navigation, & Control Operations Lead at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

It was her knowledge and precision that helped NASA Perseverance Mars mission landing to be successful, as part of the Entry Descent Landing or EDL Team lead by Allen Chen.

Dr Swati Mohan has spent over eight years on the NASA Perseverance Rover mission landing, and her Twitter updates over the last few days have been full of her excitement and anticipation of the moment of truth -- which she has so wonderfully passed on all counts.

While Perseverance was on its way to Mars, the system and procedures Dr Swati Mohan was intimately involved in enabled the spacecraft to be at the right orientation at all times, despite travelling at speeds of thousands of miles per hour, persevering through insurmountable odds and safely landing the Perseverance Rover on Mars.?

NASA

Moreover, while entering, descending and landing too, it was Dr Mohan’s Guidance, Navigation and Control system that helped in figuring out the exact position of the spacecraft and make sure that it landed appropriately.?

NASA

It takes seven minutes to travel from Mars’s atmosphere to the Martian surface. It takes longer for a signal to travel between Mars and Earth so it was important to have a robust navigation system with no room for error and Mohan’s system proved successful against all odds.?

Dr Swati Mohan: Profile and bio

Born in India, but later immigrated and raised in the US, Dr Swati Mohan actually wanted to become a paediatrician. However, since a very young age, she was inspired by sci-fi shows like the Star Trek.?

At the age of 16, she took her first physics class and that’s when she developed an interest in the field of engineering and then eventually entering the field of space.?

Dr Swati Mohan completed her Bachelors in Science from Cornell University in mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Masters in Science and PhD from the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the field of Aeronautics and Astronautics.? ?

NASA

Perseverance wasn’t the only mission she’s worked with. Dr Swati Mohan has contributed to other successful NASA missions Cassini (mission to Saturn) and GRAIL (The Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory) which was a lunar science mission in NASA's Discovery Program.