Latinos Persevering

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Eight seven, six, five five for engine Ignition two one zero.

Relate and lift off.

As the countdowns cars continues the Perseverance of humanity launching the next generation of robotic explorers to the Red Planet.

From Fudromidia and RX. It's Latino USA. I'm Mariano Rosa. Today we meet some of the Latinos working on the twenty twenty historic Perseverance mission to Mars. It's been about forty five years since the first US spacecraft landed safely on Mars. Since then, there have been several other missions to the Red Planet, each one building off of the other and getting us to where we are today Perseverance.

After the Rover Curiosity landed on Mars eight years ago, it confirmed the Red planet once could have supported life. Perseverance will try to find definitive proof catch.

Out confirmed Perseverance safely on the sefith of Mars.

The Rover left Earth last July and traveled almost three hundred million miles across space to its destination, the Red Planet. And on today's episode, you're going to hear from some of the Latinos and Latinas whose own perseverance made this mission possible. People like Dianna Trujillo.

The night before always were empty and I am setting up thinking about, you know, having the biggest night of my career. On the next morning, on getting ready.

For it, Christina Ernandez.

I woke up super early because I could not sleep at all in the anticipation of landing on Mars. I was one of the people who was actually supporting remotely from home. So because of the pandemic, a large majority of our team is actually working remotely.

Elio Morigo.

The moment we landed, we were just you know, throwing our arms up. It was super emotional because after so many years, our baby was fine only on the surface of Mars, ready to get on with the science mission.

And Alejandro Miguel San Martin, who went viral after his daughter shared with the world Alejandro's reaction to the moment when Perseverance landed on Mars.

Table being at home, my wife next to me, I was more free to actually be part of the experience than in the previous for landings that I was in the control room in a more bridgie settings, because you're doing a job, and so I think that's also play a role in my being able to celebrate the great success of Perseverance landing.

Year's producer Reinaldo Leanos Junior bringing us their stories.

Diana tru Hill was working late at NASA's JPL Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, the night before the Perseverance rover would finally touch down on the surface of Mars.

That night, I think it was not only reflecting on that, reflecting also oman family and understanding how far we have gotten us humanity and recognizing that everybody is going to get to see what we're about to do on Mars.

As flight director for the rover, Deanna knew that in just a couple of hours should be a part of history.

I was setting up and getting ready for the first Spanish language landing broadcast and NASA has done for a planetary mission, Perseverance.

Deanna would lead this broadcast and give a play by play as the rover inch closer and closer to landing. The idea for a Spanish language broadcast came to her when she was working on another Mars mission about a decade ago, Curiosity.

It came to my mind, maybe like a week or a few days before Curiosity landed in twenty twelve. But since then I've been, you know, going to the media office periodically every time there's a major mission happening, like hey, we should do this in Spanish, Hey we should do this in Spanish and yeah, So right before Perseverance started, I mentioned it again and consistently, I feel like for seven years, and then they said yes, So.

Idiana trojijoa, studijando director Deuelo, the Superficia, the Perseverance.

But oh thank god.

Pre program my nest Panol de la Nasa Planetario bien venils.

Throughout nearly two hours of broadcast, Deanna several guests by virtually like Lola and Abby from Sestime Street.

Oh.

Ona Is the Lisa C.

Mascalistas see Lola Estadosperandusi Momento.

And Colombian artist Juanzolissa. Journalists Ramos and Maria, Elena Salinas and others also made an appearance. Just before one pm Pacific time on February eighteenth, Perseverance landed on mars Emo Perceeo.

Takewaymorrow.

The video of the Spanish broadcast, which they called Junto Samos, has more than two point six million views on YouTube.

Our culture showed up to it.

Right.

It wasn't like please come, It was the other way, which was thank you for having it in Spanish. We wanted to hear it. We have always been here, but you know, nobody was talking to us. So now somebody's talking to us, and that's great.

Her family in the US and abroad also tuned in.

I'm from Colombia in my country on the public channel, they broadcasted it, so my grandma saw it and she was super excited. She was actually on the phone with my mom, my kids, my husband, my mom. They're all watching it on TV at home while I'm at the office.

Dan.

I was glad her family watched, but even more excited that they were part of this collective experience.

I'm sure that if he hadn't been the pandemic, and you know, I love my culture and everything. I feel like we would have pull up the TV outside everybody will have you on the street. People will be like watch this, and like all the neighbors would have opened the doors, Like I could see that happening on my country and even on my own street right where everybody just unites for a single thing that is happening with a lot of pride because we're part of it.

The road to NASA has been a long one for Vienna, but she remembers different times throughout her life that space found its way to her. The first time was when she was a little girl and her parents were getting a divorce. As she felt that everything around her was falling off, the stars in the night sky held her up.

That's when space came in for me, because I think that it was just more of like an escape kind of like now as an adult, you know, you have a bad day and you go out for a walk and you look at the stars and you're like, Okay,

It was the women Indiana's life who would make her aware of her true potential. On frequent visits to her grandmother's house, who lived just the block away from her, she would sit on the floor and listen to her Abuela Diaz and cousins talk about everything.

Oh, my husband did this, You're not gonna be leave that. It was kind of like they were coming together to share with each other the stories of what had occurred to them on that week. There was this beautiful thing where there was a community of women. They were just helping each other, and it was almost like this is happening to me, Is this happening to you?

Or how did you handle this, Danna says, is coming together of women was essential for her to recognize that everyone has problems, that there is always a way out.

Those problems, in many cases were very similar to each other. I can do this, I can do that, or I don't have this, or I don't have that, and a lot of the I can do this, I can do that were related to the relationship where your significant other and the backing down from what you wanted out of in some level, fear fear of it's all to my partner.

She started to wonder what about her, what were her goals and really.

What that to me translated after a while through the years was mainly that my grandma didn't finish middle school because of concerns from her significant other completely education. My mom also took a long time to even complete her degree because she was supporting my dad.

But her mom and grandma wanted Diana's life to be different. With high hopes and expectations for her. They had officially named her Lady Danna.

Part of my understanding from my grandma and choosing the name is you don't come second, you come first because you're our princess of the house and we want you to do so great. And so they tried everything from the name to the environment to protect me and build me in a way that I could see that I could do anything I wanted.

Danna eventually moved to the US when she was seventeen years old. She knew she wanted to pursue something challenging.

I have to do something hard. I have to do something that sends the message internally to my family really that women do add value, that women have value and we can contribute as much as another person or more. So when I got here at that, how do I help the men and my family recognize that.

She knew being an astronaut was one of the hardest things someone could do, so she started to explore the career paths of other astronauts and discovered several of them were aerospace engineers. That eventually led her to NASA JPL, where she's had many hats. As the Mars mission has evolved. These days, Danna and her colleagues work around the clock to make sure everything's okay on Mars.

A way of actually picturing this in my mind is like you're walking through a house and you're turning every single light, making sure that every light bulb warks, and then nothing has actually burned.

She says. The rover has a schedule like you and I.

In our case, you know, you put your alarm at not six am. The rover has an alarm at nine am, and so the wakes up at nine am to listen to the commands of the day, which includes commanding everything from moving the arm, taking images, doing any type of instrument activity, driving. But the rover just like it's exactly like you and I. Right at some point it's like I need to recharge my batteries, and so we put it to sleep.

Deanna says the days on Earth and Mars are different, so sometimes they'll start at midnight and maybe another day they'll start at three am or ten am. It just varies, and while she plans to continue to be part of the Mars mission, Deanna has not given up on her original goal to become an astronaut.

If the opportunity way to come, I will certainly go right if you were to ask me right now, Hey, there's an open spot you want to go or not. I was like, yeah, let's do it, Like there's no let me go think about it, let me consult. Nope, it's like, oh yeah, I already have my list of what I will pack done.

Coming up on Latino USA, we'll hear more from Latinos and Latinas who helped make this recent mission to Mars possible, and they're going to share some inspirational words for any of you who are thinking about a career in NASA, the Moon, the Stars, stem Mars. Stay with us, don't stay like us. Hey we're back and let's get back to some of the Latinos and Latinas who recently helped send a rover to Mars. Producer Ronaldo Leans Junior once again picks up the story from here.

In the lead up to the rover landing, part of the Mars team worked on the rover itself, and others worked hard on designing, building, and testing scientific instruments that are part of Perseverance. One of those instruments is named Sherlock, which is.

An ultra violet spectrometer and it has a companion called Watson. We love our cute names. Watson is a camera that.

Is Christina Hernandez, a payload system engineer. She worked on two scientific instruments. One that was developed in Spain called Meta.

Which is a weather station that has sensors throughout the vehicle and is going to help us understand temperature, humidity, and even the dust that we have at Mars.

And one made in Norway called Rimfax, which is.

A ground penetrating radar that as the rover is traversing and trekking along the Martian surface, Rimfax is going to be able to image what's underneath.

Working with teams based outside the US forced Christina to adapt to their clocks.

And so I would have to get up at like five am for six am seven am design meetings with the team. Early on it was lots of meetings, lots of design, lots of like you know, big picture thinking, how are we going to do this? And about a year and a half from launch it got to my favorite part, where you start testing and building hardware and

But Christina wasn't always the type of person who liked to break and take things apart.

I didn't grow up being a tinker, you know. I wasn't taking apart, you know, remotes and things like that. I explored through turning a page in a book. I loved reading. I loved sign fiction. And I remember seeing, you know, pictures from Saturn that Cassini actually took, and I asked myself, I was like, Wow, how do I take a picture of something that's so far away, so far out of my perspective and my reality.

Christina realized that she wanted to be someone who helps answer those questions that are fundamental to being human, like why are we here? And what else is out there?

I wanted to be an engineer that helped enable science, and I really feel that's what I get to do every single day as this payload systems engineer, which is really just a fancy title for somebody who helps develop the tools and the science instruments that we take to go explore and answer these fundamental questions.

The first time Christina heard about NASA's JPL was through a show called Nova on PBS. She learned that it was at JPL where some of these engineers made missions in space a reality.

My mom was such a supporter of taking me to the library, taking me to museums because we couldn't afford space camp, so my mother sought out opportunities that were accessible to us, and one of those was JPL's open House. I just came away with the feeling of this place's Disneyland for nerds. You're walking around open house and these engineers are driving small robots over kids. They're bringing out our larger robots from the Mars yard and showcasing them.

When Christina was an elementary school, her dad, an electrical technician, was studying to be an electrical engineer.

My dad would always take me everywhere with him. He would take me to the facilities, and I just specifically remember cal State, LA. There was a couple of you know, electrical centers that he would go and check in and repair, and I would see his toolkit, all of his meters where he's you know, checking on the equipment, and I started to connect you know math and science to dad, I really started to make the connection of Oh, like,

Of what I see on TV.

She started to realize that if she wanted to make science fiction happen, she needed to focus on engineering, which eventually led her to NASA's JPL. A few years ago, she took her parents and Abuilos, a Mexican immigrants, for a visit to JPL. While touring the laboratory, her grandmother told Christina a story she had never heard before.

There was a moment when they got picked up by immigration, and my grandmother tells me that when they were on their way to the immigrant center, on the radio, they were celebrating something with the Apollo astronauts. This was like back in the seventies.

You know.

My grandmother just vividly remembers that moment, you know, when she was thinking about, oh, there's people who are exploring space.

Suddenly Christina realized how far she'd made it.

When I heard that story, I got very emotional because I it was that moment where you realize what a privilege it can be to be working for a NASSA to be having your dream job. And it really started with my grandparents and my parents setting this foundation of coming to this country for greater opportunity and pushing forward no matter what the obstacles were.

When perseverance made it to Mars, Christina's grandmother took her granddaughter's contributions to the mission as also part of her own.

In the moment of landing, you know, what she had said is that yo yah yah, yeah Marte, because her granddaughter had gotten there, and it was it was very special because we are here because of our families, because they supported us with whatever.

Means they had.

It's the foundation and the path that the explorers and my family paved for me to be here.

For Ecuador born Eleo Morio, a systems test bet engineer at NASA JPL, it was his mom who was his foundation.

My mom the entire time. You know, she was an ecuador She had almost nearly a twenty plus year career as a teacher. You know, she reached the heights of her career. She was a principal, She was known across you know, the whole area for academics and such.

Then in the nineties, things started to change.

The banking system kind of collapsed, and this is around the time where Ecuador gets dollarized. My mom knew that the situation could potentially get dire, and we had some family at the time or over several years had already moved to New York City, which included my grandparents and some aunts and uncles. So we got fortunate in the sense that my grandpa requested us through the green card process and we got our green cards.

So Eleo and his mom packed up and left for New York. Ellio's older brother, seventeen years his senior, moved to New York before Elio was born.

I can't imagine putting myself through that kind of position where after twenty plus years as a professional in my respective career, I end up going to another country where I don't necessarily know the language, and I have a son and that I have to take care of and make ends meet so that he's fed, he's educated, and has opportunities to set up for him.

Elio's mom would hold different jobs, from packing food at John F. Kennedy Airport to cleaning offices. Around this time, Elio's older brother ended up getting married to a Puerto Rican woman and they all moved to the island.

It's where I form my Spanish is Puerto Rican. By all definition, I identify more Puerto Rican than Ecuadorian.

For that case, livin again in a place where Spanish was also spoken. Elio's mom resumed her teaching career. She did tutoring to bring in some extra money and went back to college.

It was always very clear for me through her that education was the way out of our situation. It wasn't full blown poverty, but we didn't have you know, we never had a car, I never had internet at my own place, we never had cable. I got all these things, you know, spending weekends at my friend's house or something. That's where I kind of became aware of what the

It was during these weekends at his friend's house, while watching Saturday morning cartoons, that Ilio became interested in science, math, and technology.

I used to love Dexter's Laboratory still do, would watch that in a heartbeat any day. I wanted to be like Dexter.

Dexter, my sensors have picked up a giant meteor headed.

Directly for Earth.

I wanted to have my own lab. I wanted to build my own robots and do my own science.

Experiments like Christina. He'd also watched Nova and Catching Cosmos, all show that really opened his eyes to what the universe had.

Fantasy played a lot into how I shaped I guess and how I formed what I believed in and created a vision in a way of what I wanted to become involved with.

Elio would stay in Puerto Rico until around the time he was in eighth grade. Then he would have to relocate again.

It was two thousand and six, two thousand and seven, that's when the economy in Puerto Rico really starts spiraling out of control into what it is today. My mom saw those patterns because she had lived through them in Ecuador.

She knew what was to come.

It was also an important time in Elio's life because he was about to go to high school, and his mom knew that the high school process would be important for him to go to college. His brother and sister in law ended up moving to Florida, so Eleo moved back to New York City in the middle of its eighth grade year. He would then go to high school.

For five years almost I have been involved with the System TESTBA team. We have the Earth equivalent models all of the subsystems that are going to go to Mars. The Earth equivalent models live here on Earth and they stay here on Earth.

He says. This allows them to test every hardware and software interaction they can think of and simulate a Mars environment through inputs that makes the rover and spacecraft computers believe that they are going through the launch, space descent and landing onto the red planet. The simulations allow them to anticipate any issues and fix them ahead of time.

I specialize on particular subsystems, including the mechanical the motor control, the head of the rover, the cameras which were the first images we got down. I had tested for years the high gain antenna, which is the antenna on the rover that lets us speak directly to the rover as well as communicate certain telemetry directly from the rover to Earth.

Elio says that the people who are now operating the rover on Mars also had to be tested.

I was leading many of these efforts on the test bed side, where you throw wrenches at people's processes. We call it becoming gremlins, and as modern data equivalents, we were impostors, trying to spoil the team in some way or form so that the teams were prepared to react in the case similar events happened on Mars or on the way to Mars.

But testing isn't the only thing he's part of. He's also part of another historic team, the Ingenuity Team.

More than one hundred and sixty million miles from Earth and aircraft is sitting on an alien world waiting to make history. NASA's Ingenuity helicopter, which traveled to Mars with the Perseverance Rover, will soon attempt the first powered flight on.

Another planet, Aliothis. He and others have been working on this for a while now.

Just about a little bit more than one hundred years ago. We're learning how to fly here on Earth. And now you know to recognize that we actually took a piece of the of the tarp from one of the original Wright Brothers vehicles and it lives inside of Ingenuity.

The Wright Brothers, the fathers of aviation in the US. On April nineteenth, Ingenuity became the first aircraft to fly on another planet.

I hope that over the next few years and decades will see this new aerial capability be used. Be it for a scientific purpose, right, so you equip helicopters or drones with scientific instruments and do different kinds of science. But also with the eventual human presence on Mars, that the humans will be able to bring these scouts right to help them navigate the terrain on Mars and map their surroundings so that they're more aware of what's around them.

As we mentioned in the very beginning of the episode, this recent mission was built off previous ones. Alejandro Miguel San Martin is the chief engineer of Guidance and Control Section at NASA JPL. He's been with NASA since the eighties.

Part of the Sign of Perseverance, for example, the spacecraft that transport Perseverance from Earth to Mars. He said, the sign that we from Mars Pathfinder in the nineties.

That mission, Miguel's first on Mars, landed on the red planet on July fourth, nineteen ninety seven, with the rover companion named Sojourner.

The small, twenty five pound, six wheeled rover only designed to last week, would end up spending eighty three days, capturing five hundred and fifty pictures and taking atmospheric measurements from the planet's surface.

He says during that mission they were encouraged to follow their product all across the mission, so from the very initial design to the implementation, to the testing and then flying it. He says at that point he felt like he'd be lucky if he was to ever be part of another Mars mission.

I remember having a conversation with a veteran of JPL that was part of the Passfinder. He said that I feel sorry for you guys, because you know I'm about to retire, so this is a great way to retire. But you guys will you know in the beginning of your career you will never perire is another mission like this?

His colleague was wrong. Miguel and many of his coworkers would get an opportunity to work on another mission, the landing of twin Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity on Mars in different days of January of two thousand and four. Then, he says, they also used a lot of the same designs from the Pathfinder mission.

And then came Curiosity, where also the same group of a team of people that we met in past find that we continue evolving and inventing new ways of landing on Mars. In the case of Curiosity, because all the previous missions that are worked that landed on Mars use airbags, so I wanted to work on a mission that landed softly.

He and the team created a landing contraption that landed the rover like a helicopter. Miguel would go on to work on other missions, including the landing of Perseverance.

It was a new experience for me because in the previous missions, first of all, I was part of them. In this one in Perseverance that was a consultant. The Perseverance team would come to me with questions, you know, and during the actual trip to Mars, I was part of also of a team that provided regular consultation to the team.

Miguel is originally from Argentina. He was born on a family farm in La Patagonia, but grew up and went to school in Buenos Aires. Every winter and summer vacation, though he'd go back to the family farm.

That's where my father taught me about the stars. He was a civil engineer and he built roads, dirt roads in some cases in the Patagonia, and for that, you know, before GPS, they navigated using the stars. So my father knew the stars. So at night in the farm he would teach me all the constellations and all the stars.

Miguel began to develop the mind of an engineer.

I was, you know, fascinated about all the machinery, particularly in the arm and the mechanical equipment, and also you know, the radios on the TVs, and so at a very early age, I wanted to be an engineer.

And then something that he vividly remembers to this day, he saw a man stepping onto the moon for the first time.

Armstrong is on the moon.

Neil Armstrong, thirty eight year old American, standing on the surface of the Moon on this July twentieth, nineteen hundred and sixty nine.

One man.

The Apollo mission had a profound impact on him.

First of all, I remember being very very aware of the risks. Are they really going to do that? I mean, it was kind of like hard to believe that they were going to attempt such a thing. So it was late at night and we were on the with my father, my mother, and my sister watching in front of a

Watching Armstrong walk on the Moon sparked Miguel's curiosity and wonder. Final confirmation of his love and interest in space would come a few years later in nineteen seventy six with NASA's Viking Project.

And I found myself in the farm actually the day of the landing, listening to the BBC on the radio, and that night the program says, well, all the systems are go, and in a few hours Viking is going to land on Mars for the first time, US attempt for the first time.

The next day, in front of a newspaper stand, he saw a photo of the Viking one spacecraft on the surface of Mars, and.

I remember that has a huge impact on me, and that's when I said, this is what I want to do. I want to be on one of these missions when I grow up.

His father told him that his best bet would be studying in the US, so when he finished high school, he packed his bags and left behind his family, friends and country. He says this was the hardest thing he ever had to do. He had to learn English and figure out how to get accepted into university, but he worked his way through. He made it to Syracuse, where he studied electrical engineering and went on to graduate school at MIT.

And I remember that I got a little piece of paper from one of the administrative persons in the Aeronastro department, and my tea said, JPL is coming tomorrow to interview. So I showed it up and I talked to the engineer doing the interview, and they flew me to JPL, and they offered me a job and the rest is history.

His dad was able to see him go through college and get the job at JPL, but unfortunately passed away before Pathfinder made it to Mars.

So that aspect, I'm a little sad that by five years or so, for five years he passed away before that. So it would have been nice for him to see that, because that was when when Mark part found the land. That is when I actually I could say, you know, I have achieved my goal. I could actually feel that all the sacrifice of leaving the country and my family and friends paid off or you know, or was worth it in some ways.

But before his father's death, Miguel was able to bring both his mom and his dad to visit NASA's JPL.

He just was blown away, right, I mean, he immediately loved the place.

He says that visit was a turning point for his mom too, who through the years had always asked him in letters from Argentina why did he leave her. After that visit, his mom wrote him saying.

Now I understand why you're there, and I won't ask you anymore why did you leave me?

Despite his long career NASA Miguel doesn't have any plans of slowing down. He plans to join an upcoming mission to retrieve the samples collected on Mars and hopes to be part of other projects elsewhere.

I mean, Mars is awesome, it's cool, but you know, we have other destinations too.

When looking back at his life and career, he says he can't believe how fortunate he's been.

I wouldn't have been able to do this without the support of my family, you know. And it's been a long journey. And I never imagined, to be honest, that I would be so lucky to fulfill what I wanted to do, one beyond my wildest imaginations. And I'm a happy person.

Diana Trujillo, Christina Hernandez, Elio Morigo and Alejandro Miel San Martin left some partying and inspirational words for Latinos and Latinas and well anyone else who might have a dream of someday pursuing a job at NASA or a career in stem.

Here they are again, write it down, Write it down and remember it, because you can do it. For me was to write it down and I'll put it on the mirror on my bathroom, and every time I was, you know, brushing my teeth, I will just read the thing that I wanted to do. Don't give up your dreams, and then keep pushing because it can be done.

I often think about the words of wisdom that my grandmother has told me, and so obviously h L. Ganas, but she also told me one that I really hold true. She was like, in signet rancheta, you know what that is to me? What that means is, you know, be self sufficient, you know, get dirty, you know, get in there and give it you're all.

For.

You know, students who want to come into engineering, be fearless, because I think oftentimes we are taught, you know, don't stir the pot, don't get in trouble. If you think you're going to break it, don't touch it. And here I'm trying now to undo all of that past advice, and I'm encouraging others to do the same, because the more you tinker, the more you fail, you eventually start to build your confidence.

You know.

I love to tell students and people that want to pursue these careers that it's absolutely worth it. It's by no means easy.

This is a very hard career.

It requires a lot of sacrifice, but you know it's it's beautiful and all of that. I just hope to inspire a few students, if at all right, to come and pursue and join me over here.

As I tell people, you know.

Sometimes you get slnely. Right.

There's not that many Latinos here, and I hope to see more in the coming years.

You need to start working from day one. We are not all good in everything, right, so you need to understand what is your thing that you're passionate and you're good at, and then you just concentrate and do well at that moment. You can have a goal of working for NASA. That's a good long term goal to have, but your short term goal should be do well on what you're doing at this moment and be excellent at it, and then the doors will open.

And before we go, we want to give a special shout out to some of the other Latinos and Latinas with fabulous names by the way, who took part in the Perseverance Mission. So to Danielle Nunez, cloud Out, Ferrol, Eric Aguilard, Fernando A. Vigueria, Fernando er Hicks, Erman, Martinez, Ivari, Contijojorgue Nunez, Jorge Pla, Garcia, Jos, Antonio Rodriguez, Manfredi, Paul Rugarolas, Roxanna Gonzalez, Borgos, Zamalis Santini de Leon, Sandra Nandez, Corrine Rojas,

Latino Usa is made possible in part by the John D. And Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, working with visionaries on the front lines of social change worldwide, and funding for Latino USA is Coverage of a Culture of Health is made possible in part by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

A middle schooler Rowann essay about what the name of the March twenty twenty mission should be. He tries to make the analogy of human qualities and characteristics of who we are with the names spirit, opportunity, curiosity, and then I believe he said something along the lines. But if those are the qualities of humans, we have missed the most important wile, which is perseverance.