Swathi Mohan grew up watching Star Trek the next generation.

The first episode that I remember seeing was they went to this part of the universe

that they fundamentally didn't have knowledge of how the rules of physics applied to, right?

But where is this place?

Where none have gone before?

She imagined herself sitting on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise.

What would it be like to boldly go where no one has gone before?

And then I kind of put it aside for a long time because it was fiction, right?

Like 24th century fiction that doesn't exist.

But the gravitational pull of space exploration never quite let her go.

After earning a PhD in aerospace engineering at MIT,

she eventually landed at the Jet Propulsion Lab.

And decades after she fell in love with space as a nine-year-old, she was part of the navigation team that successfully landed the

Perseverance Rover on Mars in 2021. And I'm counting down landing of like, you know, five minutes to impact, right, 10 minutes to impact.

And I just had this surreal feeling of like everything. This is probably as close to what it feels like to really be on the bridge of the enterprise.

Because we're literally going out to seat the unknown to search out life elsewhere in the solar system.

So it kind of came full circle to that eight-year-old and nine-year-old,

who got into space first time by watching Star Trek,

wanting to be on the bridge of the enterprise, and then being in mission control,

it's like that's probably the closest you could actually get to a real-life job that does the equivalent of that in this generation.

What do you think the nine-year-old version of you would think if she could see where you ended up?

I think she would be super excited.

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