Millions of people worldwide were thrilled on February 18 when the robotic rover Perseverance touched down on Mars, 126 million miles from Earth. They held their breath as the complicated landing system, involving a parachute and a skycrane, deployed, and the rover settled gently on the Martian surface.
For UMass Amherst College of Engineering graduate Dragana Perkovic-Martin ’08PhD, watching the landing from her home office was a nerve-wracking experience. She and her team at the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) in Pasadena, California, were in charge of the landing radar for this NASA mission. “The whole sequence is executed fully automatically,” Dragana says, “And it takes 14 minutes for the radio signals from Mars to reach Earth. So there was nothing we could do at that point. You can only hope!” In fact, Dragana says, the seven years she spent working on the landing radar were more stressful than the seven minutes it took the landing gear to function. As she worked, she const