Georgia college senior played pivotal role in NASA rover’s mission to Mars
The landing of NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars will be a historic one — and a Georgia college student helped make it happen.
Georgia Tech engineering major Breanna Ivey spent last summer interning with the space agency and was on a “mobility” team tasked with testing and engineering the rover’s key functions, WGXA reported.
Fast-forward seven months, and the car-sized robot is ready to land in the planet’s Jezero Crater zone Feb. 18.
It will mark NASA’s ninth successful mission to the red planet if the cosmic trip goes as planned, the agency said. The space-faring rover will search for signs of microbial life, and, for the first time, collect rock and soil samples to be brought back to Earth in future missions.
The Perseverance rover is scheduled to land at approximately 3:55 p.m. ET, on Feb. 18. You can watch it live here.
“It will be exciting anyway, if I didn’t have a role in it,” Ivey told WSB-TV. “But it’s even more exciting to know that I touched something that is going to land on Mars and be the first step in a mission to actually bring samples back.”
The budding engineer, who kicked off her senior year last fall, said she has always had a knack for building things and found her passion for science and math as a student in the International Baccalaureate program at Central High School in Macon, according to WMAZ-TV. She graduated from the middle Georgia school in 2017 before taking up electrical engineering at Georgia Tech in Atlanta.
In July, Ivey landed an internship at NASA working on the Mars mission and helped test the math used to make the 2,260-pound robotic rover move.
“One of the capabilities of that rover is it should be able to set a goal with some user input,” she told WMAZ. “I’m just making sure the math is right on the computer for the rover. My job is to make sure that the information that the computer sends back is correct and matches what we expect it to be.”
The Perseverance rover is the largest and heaviest Mars-bound rover ever built by NASA, and is equipped with nearly 20 cameras, McClatchy News reported. In addition to soil samples, it will collect data on the climate and geography of Mars and launch “a solar-powered helicopter named Ingenuity that will perform the first-ever controlled flight on another planet.”
Ivey said she’s grateful for the experience of working on the rover — and hopes to be an inspiration for young women and girls who look like her.
“Being a Black woman in STEM, people may try to make you feel like you don’t belong,” she said, according to WSB-TV. “But always know that you belong in every room that you still put in and that you bring something to every conversation that’s being had. So you are valuable in every space that you are in.”
This story was originally published February 18, 2021 at 10:38 AM with the headline "Georgia college senior played pivotal role in NASA rover’s mission to Mars."