Diana Trujillo

Flight Director for the Perseverance rover's robotic-arm engineering team; hosted NASA's first Spanish-language planetary landing broadcast

Diana Trujillo emigrated from Cali, Colombia, to the United States at 17 years old with $300 to her name. She supported herself working as a housekeeper while learning English at Miami Dade College — about as far from a NASA career as a starting point can be. What changed her direction was a magazine article about women working in aerospace, which she credits as her real inspiration to pursue engineering. She earned a bachelor's degree in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Maryland in 2007, becoming the first Hispanic immigrant woman admitted to NASA's competitive Academy program along the way. She joined NASA in 2007, first at Goddard Space Flight Center working on the Constellation program, then moved to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Her engineering work on Mars missions has been hands-on and mission-critical. On the Curiosity rover, she was the Dust Removal Tool Lead Systems Engineer — leading the team that developed the tool that brushes accumulated Martian dust off rock targets so instruments can study them clearly, a six-month development effort first used on Curiosity's 151st day on Mars. She also served as Surface Sampling System Activity Lead and, in 2014, Mission Lead. On Perseverance, she served as Flight Director for the entire robotic-arm engineering team — the arm that positions cameras, drills, and sample-collection tools precisely on Martian rock, all commanded from Earth with communications delays of many minutes each way, meaning there's no real-time joystick control possible across that distance. On February 18, 2021, she hosted "Juntos Perseverando" — NASA's first-ever Spanish-language broadcast of a planetary landing, bringing the moment Perseverance touched down on Mars to Spanish-speaking audiences directly, in their own language, for the first time in the agency's history. She co-created the Brooke Owens Fellowship, which supports women pursuing aerospace careers, and in 2021 received Colombia's Order of Boyacá at Commander rank, the country's highest honor.

As Flight Director for a Mars rover's robotic arm, she led the team that designs and operates the arm that positions scientific instruments precisely on rock targets millions of miles away — commands are planned and sent hours in advance, since there's no real-time control possible across the distance to Mars.

Commanding a spacecraft across a multi-minute communications delay is the same navigation and mission-planning discipline taught in flight-planning lessons, just stretched to interplanetary distance where there's no room to improvise mid-command.

She hosted "Juntos Perseverando," NASA's first-ever Spanish-language broadcast of a planetary landing, in 2021.She arrived in the United States at 17 with only $300 and worked as a housekeeper while learning English.

Wikipedia, citing NASA statements, El Tiempo, BBC Mundo

Photo: NASA on The Commons · No restrictions · Source

• Diana Trujillo
• Brooke Owens Fellowship