Every child grows up looking at the stars. After that, we follow a billion different paths through life. Some people push their sense of wonder into the background, focusing on pragmatic concerns. Some hold onto it as their constant life companion. And a dedicated few find a way to combine the two, weaving a sense of wonder into their income-earning, office-working career path.
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California — generally known as a NASA center, though it is managed by Caltech — is probably the world's premier outpost of otherworldly engineering. It is a place where space dreamers go to translate those dreams into software and circuits and mechanical systems. MiMi Aung, the project manager for the Ingenuity helicopter that is about to take flight on Mars, is a quintessential example of that marvelous synthesis.
Aung grew up in Burma (Myanmar), equally fascinated by the mystery of the night sky and the beauty of numbers. (
Bob Balaram, who originated the idea of the Mars Helicopter, is originally from India;
Håvard Grip, the helicopter's Chief Pilot, is from Norway. The dream knows no national boundaries.) She found her way to JPL and worked on the technical side of some of the most lyrical projects at the lab, including the
Deep Space Network, which talks to interplanetary spacecraft, and the
Terrestrial Planet Finder project, which pioneered the optics needed to study Earths around other stars.
Now the
Ingenuity helicopter is prepared to add an entirely new dimension to planetary exploration by taking the first, tentative flights on Mars. For every headline-grabbing moment like that, there were years of agonizing and thrilling engineering work that came before. I spoke with Aung about the secret life of the space engineer. (For more about the Mars helicopter in particular, see my
previous column.)
A lightly edited version of our conversation follows.
How does somebody grow up to become the systems engineer overseeing a helicopter on another planet?
I have to start with my parents really. They both came to the US [from Burma] and got their PhDs — my mother’s in math and my father’s in food science, which is a special branch of chemistry. I was actually born on the University of Illinois campus.
When they finished their PhDs, they went back to Burma and I grew up there from when I was 2 to 11. Then when I was 11 and a half, we moved to Malaysia. They're professors in a university there. But when I was 16, my parents really wanted me to continue on the educational track in the US, so they sent me over.
You came to the United States all by yourself at age 16?
I was taken in by my parents' American friends from graduate school. I got on a plane and flew to the other side of the world. I didn't even have a picture of these people, because this is back in '83. I asked, "How will I know you?" and they said, "Don't worry, we'll see you,” because I was flying into Decatur, Illinois, which is a tiny airport. There they were. They said, "Hi, MiMi, we're Anne and Walt."
It was about people helping people. Walt and Anne really took it seriously, so they talked me through my senior year in high school and helped me find my path.