Lady Diana Trujillo Pomerantz became the most searched personality on Google, surpassing even the President of Colombia, Ivan Duque, after participating in the mission that brought the exploratory vehicle ‘Perseverance’ to the planet Mars last Thursday.
The aerospace engineer who was born in Cali, who in 2007 became the first Latin American woman to be admitted by the NASA Space Academy, was this time in charge – in addition to participating in the design of the robotic arm and two instruments from the explorer named Pixl and Sherloc- to introduce the world to the robot’s arrival on Mars, in the first live broadcast in Spanish of a NASA space mission.
The scout vehicle, considered the most advanced that has been sent into space so far, weighs about a ton, measures approximately 3 meters long and 2.7 wide, has more than 30 cameras, an atmosphere analyzer for see the possibility of extracting oxygen, a robotic arm and a small 2-pound helicopter that flew over the thin Martian atmosphere, which will be on the planet around a Martian year, 687 days on Earth.
“The goal of the ‘Perseverance’ mission is to find out if at any time there was life on the surface of Mars. We are going to get to a place called Jezero crater. In this crater we will do research because there is clay. which could tell us if there was water … If we find this, we will also do the research to see if life probably started on Mars and Earth at the same time.So we have a very interesting question to answer “Diana said during an interview with CNN.
The ‘Perseverance’ was launched on July 30, 2020 and took seven months to reach the red planet, under the mission ‘Mars Rover Perseverance’ one of the most important in the exploration of the planet.
She explains that her passion for astronomy was born while living in Colombia, “in the 80’s, a time of great violence in my country, I spent it looking at the sky to give me peace. I always wondered how they could coexist together. the stars and the planets without chaos, and that’s how it all started for me. “
Read more: Robot Perseverance sends more images of Mars
Caleña, the father is an accountant and lives in Colombia, resides in the United States with his mother. He arrived in this country when he was 17, without knowing English and ended up looking for a way to learn the language and thus begin his university studies.
With only $ 300 in her pocket and the intention to help her mother in the household economy, Diana began working as a domestic worker and paid for her English classes at Miami Dade College. But she got so bored of the same thing, that she sneaked into math department classes, “I was bored of learning English and I sat down to answer any questions I had about math, because I didn’t need to speak any language, the numbers around the world are the same and here I realized what I liked, ”she explains.
Aerospace engineer Diana Trujillo has been married to William Pomerantz since 2009 and they have two children.
Special for El País
Over time he came to have four jobs, tasks that allowed him to begin his studies in space science and eventually in aerospace engineering at the University of Florida.
That’s how she was encouraged to apply for admission to NASA Academy, where she became one of only two people in her cohort to be employed. While there, he visited the University of Maryland, where he helped Professor Brian Roberts investigate how robots would operate in space. And she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Maryland in 2007. Her story was turned into a children’s science book by Kari Cornell and Fatima Khan.
“I knew that NASA was the only place where I could do what I set out to do, I wanted to explore, I wasn’t looking for any kind of recognition, but a learning experience,” he explains.
“After graduating I worked with a program to get cargo to the Space Station, then‘ Curiosity ’and now Mars 2020, and sometimes I don’t even believe it when I start to think I had nothing and didn’t even know only the language “, said at the time to the Country, caleña, that is withdrawn of the Canyars School.
She believes that you don’t need to be a genius or have five postgraduate degrees to work at NASA, just “want, want, want to do, but don’t want for two or three months, want for five years.”
And he adds: “And to understand that every time a door opens you walk, you walk. The more difficult the situation the more you want. What one needs is desire and that sheath of survival that you have in your heart.”
Diana says she doesn’t want to miss this moment when they find life on Mars, but there are many projects she has pending, “I want to see if I can work with the astronauts, go to Mars and the moon, and keep working on organizing with which I am “.
With her husband William Pomerantz, an American scientist who carries rockets into space, Diana also leads the Brooke Owen Fellowship Foundation, which helps women graduates of the university, especially Latinos and other minorities, by giving them a chance. in the aerospace industry.
Diana Trujillo was the first Hispanic migrant to the Space Academy. At first he worked in the NASA area dedicated to building unmanned spacecraft.
Photo taken from Twitter
Descent to Mars
The descent to Mars of the ‘Mars Rover Perseverance’ mission is one of the most important in the exploration of the red planet. “I think what we are going to discover with this mission may come from a concern to understand or solve the problem of climate and how to take care of planet Earth,” the hawk told the BBC.
“If we realize we’re not alone in the universe, forget it, this is like when one realizes that the cart wasn’t one, that it was borrowed and one goes, washes it and cleans it. Go to have to re-evaluate and have that introspective and say, ‘Oh my God, if I’m not the only one, then I have to do this better.’ And my analogy of the chariot is exactly planet Earth, when you realize that you are not the only one, that the car was not yours, it is up to you to take more care, ”he added.
According to astronomy expert Germán Porta, “this mission is a historic fact for humanity because it aims to test whether or not there is life on this planet and prepare the manned missions that must descend on it, is to that is, the first humans on Mars. It’s a bigger milestone than the descent of the first humans to the moon more than 50 years ago. “
For his part, the coordinator of the Planetarium of Bogota, Carlos Augusto Molina, states that “Mars is an objective of interest because it explains very well some of the moments of the formation of the solar system. The ‘Perseverance’ wants to study which they are the properties of Martian earth, its humidity, its atmosphere and trying to trace the biological profile of a planet like Mars. “
The ‘Perseverance’ was launched on July 30 last year and took 7 months to reach the red planet. “The descent was supremely dangerous, so dangerous that about half of the missions sent to Mars fail or are lost,” explains Porta, adding that “scientists call the descent to Mars the 7 minutes of terror, because when the missions enter the atmosphere and atmospheric friction begins to heat the protective shield, all communication with the control room is lost and the mission must maneuver automatically to brake from 20 thousand kilometers per hour to a gentle descent to the surface , a real feat that involved having parachutes, backhoes and technological designs for surface analysis “.
Precisely, the Perseverance descended to the Martian surface held by a “celestial crane”, so it survived the so-called ‘Seven Minutes of Terror’, which is the period of entry and descent into the Martian atmosphere in which the temperature and the risk was maximum.
Whether this NASA mission is successful depends on starting tests in a few months, in 4 years a new mission could be designed to pick them up and bring them back, and in 5 or 6 years they would be analyzing whether in these tests there are fossils of bacteria or living bacteria.
According to Porta, the most important experiment is the robotic arm that will take samples from the Jezero crater, which millions of years ago was a lake. “This robotic arm is a marvel. It has 3,000 complex pieces.”
This mission carried a helicopter, small and very light, of almost 2 kilos to fly over this thin Martian atmosphere. “If the flight is successful, new missions will bring more robust and complex helicopters. It’s very exciting to see how these missions crystallize our dreams. It puts us in front of the challenges that science fiction posed to us. Every time we explored a planet in the solar system it gives us a perspective of our life, of how life on planet earth has withstood changes, ”Molina points out.
Porta concludes that “in the 21st century, it’s the century in which we’re going to leave the planet. Space exploration has changed our lives completely. We’re going to end up living on Mars, no doubt, in a few dozen years. years we will establish bases on this planet and it would not be strange for us to find signs that say ‘Do you want to go live on Mars ?, we need plumbers, masons, electricians’, hence the importance of integrating scientific culture into general culture ” .
Image of the Rover Perseverance wheel on Mars.
NASA’s Twitter Perseverance Mars Rover