MELBOURNE: It took nearly two decades for Bob Balaram’s opinion to take off. Sometime in the 1990s, Balaram, with a Stanford professor, has proposed a “helicopter for Mars”. But he could not see through it.
The technology just wasn’t there. An incident that happened seven years ago, Nasa director Jet transfer laboratory (JPL) was giving a talk on drones, leading to a question to which he had the answer – could drones fly on Mars? “Someone remembered that I tried this in the 1990s and he praised me.
My team and I had eight weeks to prepare a proposal that led to some initial research money, which has now grown into a daring endeavor – the first helicopter on Mars, Ingenuity, ”Balaram told TOI a week later Perseverance, Nasa’s newest Mars rover, landed successfully.
While working on his part for the Mars 2020 mission, he would often run into Swati Mohan, the director of command, navigation and control. “We work on Canada when we meet in the hall,” he said. On the Sustainability team alone, there are at least 12 scientists of Indian descent working, eight of them women.
There’s Vandana Verma, who could take the rover out for a spin on Mars next week. Perseverance rover, Nagin Cox, is a team deputy in engineering work. A former U.S. Air Force officer was born in Bengaluru, grew up in Malaysia and the U.S., and has been a spacecraft operations engineer at Nasa / JPL for more than 20 years.
The land manager of avionics – which means overseeing the electronic systems for communication, navigation, display aboard the spacecraft – was Yogita Shah, an electrical engineer from Aurangabad who went on to become a flight systems engineer by Nasa JPL. Developing software for Usha Guduri, a BITS Pilani alumnus, was the leader in action and command planning.
With over 18 years in software development, Guduri had worked earlier for Cassini (the fourth probe to Saturn) and Dawn (the first mission to orbit a deep planet). Vishnu Sridhar led the effort to test SuperCam, which examines the composition of Martian rocks. Among those testing part of the ground data systems was Kavita Kaur of Chandigarh.
Moving in on the path taken by the spacecraft as it entered, descended and landed was Soumyo Dutta, an aerospace engineer. The motor control assembly during the rescue of the spacecraft was the responsibility of Priyanka Srivastava, a systems engineer who studied in Lucknow and Punjab before working on three Nasa flight missions. For the software for motor control assembly, another systems engineer, Shivali Reddy, was on board.
Finally, helping the automated system to collect and manage space material is Neel Patel, who is also a systems engineer. (By submission from Srinivas Laxman in Mumbai)