Feature
Aggie Engineers Design By Noah Pflueger-Peters
PATHWAY
TO MARS WHEN NASA’S PERSEVERANCE ROVER APPROACHED MARS
“Hardware that I designed and built with my own hands is going to touch the surface of mars.” – SARA LANGBERG
on February 18, 2021, UC Davis mechanical and aerospace engineering (MAE) alumna Jessica Samuels ’99 and Sara Langberg ’16 watched particularly closely to see their hard work pay off. Perseverance, the largest and most advanced Mars rover to date, will explore the existence of water, launch history’s first extraterrestrial helicopter and serve as the first leg of a mission to collect Martian rock and soil samples and bring them to Earth. Samuels is a principal systems engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). For Perseverance, she led the teams behind the sampling and catching system, the spacecraft flight systems engineering development and surface operations. She was thrilled to see the landing video Perseverance recorded, which proved these systems she spent years designing, testing, refining and integrating did indeed work as they should. “It’s a real treat to get to develop these operations,” said Samuels. “It’s also really rewarding to go through the whole life cycle of the project and then feed our lessons learned back into future operations.” Langberg was excited to see Perseverance’s precious cargo—the Ingenuity helicopter she built as an aeromechanical engineer at AeroVironment—survive to make the first powered flight on another planet. Ingenuity opens the door for larger and more complex helicopters that can explore greater distances and more difficult terrains on Mars. “I’m honored and humbled to be a part of it,” said Langberg. “Hardware that I designed and built with my own hands is going to touch the surface of Mars and that’s just mind-boggling.” Though Samuels and Langberg contributed to Perseverance in different ways and took different paths to the project, their stories both started as MAE undergraduate students at UC Davis.
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