The eight San Diego State alumni on the NASA team that designed the most recent—and most ambitious—Mars rover, Curiosity, visited SDSU on Friday to illuminate the challenging, innovative work they performed during the last decade.
Each alumnus worked separate aspects of the Curiosity mission, which began in 2000. The eight former Aztecs attracted a large crowd that filled College of Arts and Letters 201. During the event, titled “Aztecs Take Mars,” each person ran through his or her background at SDSU and specific involvement in the mission to an engaged crowd full of students and professors.
The alumni work in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is under the umbrella of NASA. The JPL traces its roots back to the days when the U.S. and Russia competed in the space race, but still retains more autonomy than other departments within NASA.
Prior to the lecture, the eight alumni sat down with The Daily Aztec to talk about their experiences working on their mission—from the effects of the media attention they received to the nail-biting last seconds before Curiosity touched down on the surface of Mars.
“Once the rover enters the outer atmosphere of Mars, there’s a transmission delay,” “surge” navigator for the Curiosity mission Mark Ryne said. “So at that point, we already knew it had either crashed or landed successfully—there was nothing we could do about it.”
Videos from the NASA control room immediately after Curiosity’s touchdown revealed what an enormously emotional moment it was for the scientists and engineers, who put more than a decade of work into the moment’s success.
“My husband told me that you either watch the rover land successfully and everybody goes and gets a beer,” Ryne’s wife Cathy Ryne said after the interview, “or it crashes, and everyone goes and gets a beer.”
For Brandon Florow and Joey Brown, founder of the SDSU Rocket Project who graduated in 2005, being part of such a large, public endeavor so early in their careers was a surreal experience.
“I had known about and watched a lot of the people working on the mission for a long time, so to actually get to work with them on a project like this was incredible,” Brown said.
Curiosity touched down on the surface of Mars on August 5, 2012, a date that the alumni have inscribed on their matching blue polo shirts. The date signifies not only the end of their grueling mission to put a car-sized rover on a distant planet, but the beginning of their quest to encounter what mysteries lay undiscovered on the red planet. Curiosity has already exceeded expectations by providing groundbreaking scientific research, and it’s expected to stay in operation for years to come.
