Life Changers - Anita Sengupta

Discovery

BBC

Science, Technology

4.3 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 14 September 2015

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When Anita Sengupta was a little girl, she dreamed of time travel aboard the TARDIS, along with Tom Baker, her favourite incarnation of Dr Who. It was this and watching episodes of Star Trek with her dad, which led her to study science and later still, to gain a degree in aerospace engineering from an American University. If she could not build a TARDIS, she would build the next best thing – space craft, capable of reaching other planets. A few years later, still in her 20s, Anita was put in charge of a team at JPL, Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Her mission was to design and develop the supersonic parachute which helped put Nasa’s Curiosity Rover onto the surface of Mars in 2012. It was the most sophisticated lander ever built and the plan to get it safely down the surface of the red planet was little short of crazy. Her team’s motto was 'Dare Mighty Things'.

Kevin Fong talks to Anita about her work, her passion and about the lessons one must learn from failure as well as success in order to explore the unknown. She tells Kevin why Mars has revived Nasa’s fortunes and transformed how we think about our place in the Universe.

(Photo: Anita Sengupta. Credit: Nasa)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for downloading from the BBC.
0:03.0	The details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use,
0:07.0	go to BBCworldservice.com slash podcasts.
0:11.0	You're with Discovery on the BBC.
0:15.0	I'm Kevin Fong.
0:17.0	Today I'll be talking to another life changer, one who's stepped foot on the surface of Mars. Well, almost.
0:25.0	In about one minute, curiosity's EDL software will wake up and begin final preparation for entry.
0:31.0	People sometimes say, oh, wouldn't you like to go to Mars?
0:33.2	When you build something that does go to Mars, you kind of already there.
0:37.1	Stand by flight.
0:38.1	Copy.
0:40.1	It was just very satisfying and it's definitely the most satisfying thing that I've done in my career.
0:45.0	The administration is updated.
0:47.0	A mentor heading alive.
0:50.0	Born in Scotland, of Indian descent, Anita Sen Gupta moved to the United States to pursue a dream,
0:56.2	to build things that would journey to other worlds.
0:59.6	Today, she's an aerospace engineer at NASA's jet propulsion laboratory in California
1:04.8	and played a key role in the mission to put the curiosity rover on the surface of Mars in 2012.
1:11.1	It was the most ambitious planetary landing ever undertaken in the history of space
1:16.3	exploration. Most of the technology had never been tested. For seven minutes as the
1:21.7	rover descended through the Martian atmosphere,
1:24.0	thousands of engineers and scientists held their breath,
	...

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