From Star Trek to Stars: Swati Mohan, A Beacon of Hope for Women Around the World
“Touchdown confirmed. Perseverance safely on the surface of Mars” said an emotionally sounded American woman, no one thought it would be Dr Swati Mohan, an Indian origin American Scientist who played an important role in the landing of the rover. On February 18, 2021, when Perseverance landed safely on the rocky surface of Mars, it put Swati Mohan in the global headlines sending waves of smiles to many Indians and millions of women around the world.
Who is Dr Swati Mohan?
Swati Mohan was born in Bengaluru and she spent as little as one year in India before completely migrating to the United States. She spent her childhood in the Northern Virginia-Washington DC metro area.
Although Mohan spent her entire life in the United States, she prides herself on being an Indian. She said, “I am Indian as much as I am American. My parents raised me with very strong Indian values…So we were able to take the best of both worlds and integrate it into who we are”.
She is the head of Mars 2020 Guidance, Navigation, and Controls (GN&C) Operations and the communications head between the GN&C subsystem and the rest of her project’s teammates. What laid the foundation for her to choose such a career? The answer is quite simple, it’s the star trek series. Unbelievable, right?
How Star Trek influenced Her?
Star Trek series was a phenomenal blockbuster throughout the world and it caught Swati Mohan’s attention too. When she was nine, she watched the first episode of star trek and she was awe-struck seeing the depictions of the new regions of the universe that was explored in the series.
“I remember thinking ‘I want to do that. I want to find new and beautiful places in the universe.’ The vastness of space holds so much knowledge that we have only begun to learn,” she had told NASA.
Although it sparked her interest in space, she wanted a career as a paediatrician. She took her first physics class at age 16 and on the emphasis of her teacher she went on to pursue engineering.
She graduated as a Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University, later she went on and did her M.S. and PhD in Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT.
At Nasa, Swati Mohan works in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and is the Guidance & Controls Operations Lead for the Mars 2020 mission. She said, “I am responsible for the training of the GN&C team, scheduling the mission control staffing for GN&C, as well as the policies/procedures the GN&C uses in the mission control room”
Dr Mohan was working on the Perseverance rover as early as 2013 and she was in charge of the spacecraft that carried the rover. Her job was to ensure the safe transit and landing of the rover in the Martian soil. When the rover landed on Mars on February 18th, it was an emotional moment for the entire JPL Mission Control Centre as they erupted in joy. Swati Mohan later admitted that she was nervous during the final moments of the landing. Now, she’s a famous person in India as well as among science lovers.
From Kalpana Chawla to Swati’s achievement, one can safely say women empowerment is heading towards a stronger position. Sometimes, the world needs someone such as Swati to set an example that helps all the women in the world to believe in themselves and their dreams.
Note: The above article was published in “The Asian Chronicles”, a tabloid newspaper and magazine headquartered in Gurugram, Haryana.