"Perseverance” and “Ingenuity” aren’t just the names of spacecraft on Mars; they are also the human qualities we need to get us through the post-pandemic world, said Adam Steltzner, chief engineer and mission leader of NASA's Mars 2020 mission.
Steltzner, who works at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, CA, was the keynote speaker on the second day of the (ISC)² Security Congress 2021, taking place virtually through Wednesday, October 20.
After NASA landed the nuclear-powered “Curiosity” rover on Mars in 2012, the agency worked to send another rover to the Red Planet. That rover, “Perseverance,” landed on Mars in February 2021, accompanied by a helicopter-like robotic spacecraft called “Ingenuity.”
Getting there wasn’t easy, Steltzner recalled. It required adjusting to a new way of working brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic with a skeleton crew of six at JPL and people working from home. The team had to draw on significant amounts of human perseverance to execute the mission.
“We landed a rover on the surface of Mars in the middle of a global pandemic. We launched her from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in the height of the summer surge.” The rover and the Mars helicopter were named before the pandemic but their names are “great descriptors of not only spacecraft but of the human attributes we need to weather this storm,” he said.
“As we turn to look to the future, we are staring into the unknown. What will recovery look like? It is likely that between now and the future, we will have to exercise perseverance and ingenuity within ourselves again and again and again.”
And with those words, Steltzner ..
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