INTERVIEW/The Taiwanese engineer 'driving' NASA's Perseverance Mars rover
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Image courtesy of Yen Jeng
Los Angeles, Feb. 19 (CNA) When NASA's Perseverance rover successfully touched down on the surface of Mars on Thursday after a seven-month, 480 million-kilometer journey, a Taiwan-born engineer and remote pilot was preparing to guide it through its first movements on the red planet.
Yen Jeng (嚴正), a 61-year-old graduate of National Tsing Hua University in Hsinchu and a 20-year veteran in NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is now taking part in his fourth Mars exploration mission with the agency's Robot Interfaces and Visualization team, this time as its leader.
In an interview with CNA, Yen described his expectations for the next few months, which he characterized as "living on Earth in Mars time."
He explained that because nighttime temperatures on Mars can drop to 80 degrees below zero Celsius, the rover must spend those hours heating itself, while conducting its research during the day.
During those hours, Yen and his team will work at preparing the computer code that will guide the rover's movements the next day.
However, because a day on Mars is around 40 minutes longer than a day on Earth, the time difference between the two planets is continually changing.
For example, Yen said, "today my shift started at 2 p.m. Next week it will start at 10 p.m."
