Header image: illustration depicts the Opportunity rover traveling on Mars’ surface. The rover explored the Meridiani Planum where it found evidence of ancient liquid water. Opportunity survived on the red planet for almost 15 years.
Three scientists and engineers from Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list have paved the way for Moon and Mars settlements with refueling stations and homemade oxygen–and made friends with robots along the way.
By Arianna Johnson
NASA rovers are unique among space gadgets. In their search for signs of life on Mars, they’ve taken on human qualities themselves.
Despite their technological sophistication, their fat tires and robot arms resemble children’s toys. The photos they send back to Earth — of volcanic dust and huge rocky mosaics on towering hillsides — are breathtakingly from another world. But the rovers also photograph their own tracks in the sand, sometimes making it look like they kicked off their shoes to frolic on a Cape Cod beach.
One of the stories being told about the Mars rovers is Good Night Oppy, a documentary that dives into the Opportunity rover’s heartfelt story, which premiered on Wednesday on Amazon Prime. When the Opportunity rover finally went dark in June 2018, after operating 14 years longer than anyone expected and abandoned only after NASA tried hundreds of times to re-establish contact, it was an emotional time. Tears were shed. It’s safe to say nobody ever got a lump in their throat because they grieved over the fiery death of a rocket booster.
“This was [one] of the most heart-wrenching, gut-wrenching periods where you haven’t given up hope yet that you’re going to be able to contact the mission,” Kathryn Stack Morgan of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory told Forbes.
“It was very sad,” said Marianne Gonzalez, Morgan’s colleague. “There was a lot of commotion at JPL. To see all the hard work that [Opportunity’s team] put in and their connection to [Opportunity] going out was kind of heartbreaking.”
There have been two Mars rovers since Opportunity — Curiosity, which landed in August 2012, and Perseverance, which has been roaming the red planet for nearly two years — and each of them have also evoked strong connections with their teams on Earth.
For Hannah Rana, who helped develop a rover for the European Space Agency, the relationship with the fancy golf carts becomes almost parental. “We start off with a really simple model, and then you put this cute little model that you’re modeling around in space,” she told Forbes. “You slowly increase the complexity of the design and — this is going to sound strange — it really does feel like you’re building up your baby.”
Illustration of Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter in the background. The rover has been exploring the Jezero Crater since February 2021.
DPST/Newscom
Morgan, Gonzalez and Rana are alumni of Forbes’ 30 Under 30. It’s an exciting time at NASA with November 16’s maiden launch of an Artemis mission that promises to return people to the Moon and eventually settle them on Mars. Morgan, a 2013 30 Under 30 alum, is a participating scientist on the Mars Research Mission and was the deputy project scientist on the Mars 2020 Rover Mission. Gonzalez, a 2022 lister, has been a technologist and systems engineer for NASA’s JPL for seven years. Rana, who was on Europe’s 2022 list, is a research scientist for JPL focusing on cryogenic particle detectors (which can spot particles at the extremely low temperatures found in space).
In an industry where only one in five participants identify as female, these three women have carved out a place for themselves among the elite.
Gonzalez is working to develop an instrument called the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment. The device tests a way for future human explorers to make their own oxygen from the Martian atmosphere. The oxygen is not only for breathing, it’s for rocket fuel, too.
“The idea is that when we go to Mars, we’re able to generate oxygen autonomously because Mars’ atmosphere is actually made of 95% to 96% carbon dioxide,” she told Forbes. “If we can just send these units that can produce [oxygen] while on Mars, that’ll save us a lot of time and money.”
Gonzalez worked on developing the Perseverance rover, but once it was launched in July 2020, she moved on to her next assignment. Perseverance was her first mission with NASA, however, so she still follows its progress across the barren Marscape.
“I still have an emotional attachment to the rover even though I’m not involved at all anymore,” Gonzalez said.
Luckily for Gonzalez, Perseverance seems to be in good hands with Morgan, who works closely with the rover. In February 2021, it landed at Mars’ Jezero Crater and became the first to return samples of the planet’s surface to Earth. The crater had an ancient lake, so Perseverance was tasked with finding ancient life that might have thrived there.
Curiosity rover in Gale Grate on June, 15th, 2018. The rover discovered that Mars had the right characteristics to support ancient life.
NASA/JPL/Caltech/AP
Morgan is second in command on the science side of the mission, acting as the glue that holds together the designers and the engineers to ensure that the teams are running smoothly and in harmony.
“We have a science team of about 500 science researchers from around the world that are associated with the rover science team,” she told Forbes. “It’s our job as project scientists to lead that team.”
Although Morgan devotes a lot of her time to Perseverance, she still keeps tabs on her first “rover child,” Curiosity. At the time, Curiosity was the largest rover that NASA ever sent into space, and its Mars landing was part of the 2011 Mars Science Laboratory mission whose job was to discover whether the red planet has adequate conditions to support small life forms, or microbes. It landed on August 5, 2012, and was supposed to operate for two Earth years. It’s been exploring and sending back images for ten. “This is all now on borrowed time,” Morgan said.
Rana, a native of Luxembourg, worked on the Luna-27 mission during her time at the European Space Agency from 2015 to 2017. Luna-27 is set to land its own rover on the Moon’s south pole in 2025, and part of Rana’s work was figuring out what kind of heat the rover would be exposed to. The mission’s goal is to find minerals and ice that can potentially be used for a crewed base that could include refueling stations for Mars travelers.
The Moon “is kind of a useful checkpoint for Mars missions,” Rana told Forbes. “We really are moving into a very futuristic vision of what we can do with space travel.”
Morgan and her two children pose infront of the Perseverance rover.
Courtesy of Kathryn Stack Morgan
The emotional connection between space agency staff on Earth and rovers in remote locations helps keep people at the center of that futuristic vision. Humanizing Opportunity and its successors seems to be a very Earthling thing to do, and a feeling Morgan describes when she talks about Perseverance.
“There’s a picture of me with my two kids at JPL with the rover in the background before it went off to Mars,” she told Forbes. “When I look at that picture, I really do think of my two human children and then my rover in the background.”
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