What It's Like To Be... with Dan Heath An Aerospace Engineer
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Apr 7, 2026 Swati Mohan, an aerospace engineer at NASA JPL who led guidance and landing callouts for the Perseverance rover. She discusses guidance, navigation, and controls, the drama of the “seven minutes of terror,” testing breakthroughs, rover sample-collection strategy, planetary protection and clean-room routines, and the engineering trade-offs and emotional stakes behind Mars missions.
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Sometimes The Cure Is Worse Than The Problem
- Fixing a discovered problem can introduce new risks, so teams weigh the risk of change against the known risk of the defect.
- Swati likens the trade to surgery: avoid operating unless the 'tumor' justifies the disruption.
Last Minute Test Suddenly Passed Before Launch
- A component repeatedly failed tests for months, then suddenly passed in a full end-to-end run the week before Christmas.
- The team literally jumped up and down because that successful integrated test proved the landing architecture could work.
The Seven Minutes Of Terror Is Pure Autonomy
- Entry, descent, and landing (EDL) is fully autonomous over about seven minutes where a spacecraft decelerates from ~5.2 km/s to zero.
- Teams must wait ~11 minutes for light-speed communications, so mission control hears results after touchdown.