Swati Mohan is the Indian-American engineer who piloted the NASA Rover to go to Mars.

The mission “Mars 2020” orchestrated by NASA has just passed a crucial stage, with the successful landing of a rover on the “red planet”. At the head of operations is Swati Mohan, an Indian-born engineer with a promising career. Image: NASA

“Historical.” This is how the arrival of NASA’s Perseverance Rover to the planet Mars was described on Thursday, February 18, after a journey of almost seven months, after being launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida on July 30, 2020. One of the objectives of This mission is to explore the “red planet” in hopes of finding traces of past microbial life.

Among the scientists at the helm of this unprecedented ambitious space project is engineer Swati Mohan, who played a key role in leading the project. Responsible for orientation, navigation and control operations, he was at the heart of this mission. On his Twitter account, he regularly invites Internet users to follow the progress of this space epic, followed around the world.

Swati Mohan was born in India and raised in the United States, in the metropolitan area of ​​Northern Virginia – Washington DC. With a bachelor’s degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering and a doctorate in aeronautics / astronautics, the scientist has worked on several NASA missions, including the Cassini space probe (launched in 1997) to explore Saturn and the two GRAIL spacecraft sent to the Moon. (2012). He joined the “Mars 2020” project in 2013, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Pasadena, California).

According to information on the NASA website, his passion for the space world began at age 9, after watching an episode of the famous science fiction series “Star Trek.” NVG

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