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She came to the U.S. with $300. Now she's part of NASA's Mars mission.
Yahoo News [yahoo.com]
When NASA's Perseverance rover successfully landed on Mars [cbsnews.com] last week, aerospace engineer Diana Trujillo [twitter.com], who is a flight director on the mission, said in an interview with CBS News that it took her some time to process that it had arrived on the red planet.
"I was very much on the mindset of 'What's happening?'" she said. Then as pictures and videos from Perseverance started to beam back, it became real.
"Are we safe? I think that watching the image was when I actually processed that we had actually landed," she added.
The landing only marked the beginning of Perseverance's stop on Mars, but playing a leadership role in the historic mission to find life there was decades in the making for Trujillo. Her dreams of reaching space and wanting to understand the universe came as a young person in Cali, Colombia. Her parents were divorcing and as a 17-year-old, she decided to go to the United States, arriving with only $300 and not speaking any English. She worked housekeeping jobs to pay for her studies and later joined NASA in 2007.
Trujillo is now part of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab and worked on the team that created the robotic arm that will collect rock samples on Mars. "Understanding if we're alone in the universe is the ultimate question," she said. "I hope that within the one year of surface operations on Mars, we can answer that question soon."
Role modeling, a real thing that engineers can do.
Throughout her career, a similar theme followed: She'd be one of the few Latinas working in science. Now, she knows whenever she's working as one of the surface flight directors for Perseverance, she's representing more than just herself.
"I know I'm not walking in there alone," she said. "I'm walking in there and every single thing that I do, I'm representing my country, my culture, my heritage, my people, and I have to give my best every single time."
"I get to elevate and amplify my culture and all the countries that speak Spanish by sending a message to everybody that we're here, we're present," she added.
According to the Student Research Foundation, Hispanics hold only 8% of the STEM workforce — of which Hispanic women only comprise 2%. Trujillo believes the way to break the glass ceiling is to have more role models. That influenced her decision to be host of NASA's first-ever Spanish language broadcast for a planetary landing last Thursday. The show was called "Juntos perseveramos," or "Together we persevere," and it garnered more than 2.5 million views on YouTube. She's even gotten the attention of fellow countrywoman and global music star Shakira.
"The more hers there are, the more engineers and scientists that are Latin are out there, the more chances we have for those kids to have la chispa, where they say, 'I want to be that," she said.
