GETTING CURIOUS | How Do You Persevere, Mars Rover? with Christina Hernandez

Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness

Sony Music

Science, Self-improvement, Comedy, Education, Society & Culture

4.9 • 21.5K Ratings

🗓️ 17 February 2021

⏱️ 83 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Put on your finest loungewear and raise your favorite coffee mug because this week’s episode of Getting Curious is an EVENT! After six years of incredible work, NASA’s Perseverance rover is now exploring Mars, and Jonathan spoke with Christina Hernandez, an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, all about the mission just before landing day. Listen in to learn more about the Red Planet, the Perseverance mission, and Christina’s advice for the next generation of NASA innovators. Keep up with rover coverage on Twitter @NASAPersevere and Instagram @NASA, and with Christina’s amazing career on Twitter @estrellasycafe. For Spanish-language coverage, make sure to check out @NASA_es on Twitter and Instagram. Find out what today’s guest and former guests are up to by following us on Instagram and Twitter @CuriousWithJVN. Transcripts for each episode are available at JonathanVanNess.com. Check out Getting Curious merch at PodSwag.com. Listen to more music from Quiñ by heading over to TheQuinCat.com. Jonathan is on Instagram and Twitter @JVN and @Jonathan.Vanness on Facebook. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Getting Curious, I'm Jonathan Van Ness, and every week I sit down for a 40 minute conversation with the brilliant expert to learn all about something that makes me curious.
0:10.0	On today's episode, I'm joined by NASA engineer Christina Hernandez, where I ask her,
0:15.8	Mars Rover, how do you persevere?
0:18.6	Welcome to getting curious, this is Jonathan Vanes, and can I just say, if I could ever like change my music for an episode of getting curious and change it to like a very suspenseful, gorgeous, like cereal-esque like podcasty music I would because the suspense is real I'm so excited about I just I can't even like build it up anymore right now
0:41.7	because I think that was as much as I can do without being too excited.
0:44.2	So welcome Christina Hernandez, who is an aerospace engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California,
0:50.7	and you're working on NASA's Mars perseverance rover mission, which in real life is going to be landing like tomorrow.
0:59.0	So what do you do? How does it work? What does it mean to be to be a literal aerospace engineer?
1:12.0	I'm still trying to figure that out quite honestly. So by trade I am an aerospace
1:17.8	engineer at work we have a lot of really fancy multi-word titles so I'll like break it down but means is a payload systems engineer and really what that means is you know
1:28.8	when it comes to getting things done I'm your girl right like? Like, so if, you know, we're testing that day
1:35.2	or if we have to have a meeting to coordinate
1:37.2	with people from Europe to figure out
1:38.8	how the instrument works and troubleshoot problems,
1:41.1	like I'm definitely in there, I'm being nosy I'm asking
1:44.7	questions and at the end of the day my job is to make sure that all of the science
1:50.5	instruments which are the tools that the rover is going to use to do its thing
1:54.4	once it gets to Mars work right from the design from the build to when we're testing and
2:00.6	finally when we're on Mars actually doing our thing. And so that's what I love about my job. It's not boring. I get to do a little bit of everything and I get to ask really annoying questions and get them answered.
2:13.8	Okay, so here's the thing.
2:15.2	I meant to ask more about like Mars
2:19.0	and like what everything's gonna actually look like
	...

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