I had just started on the team. This was about maybe six months to a year in.

The science office, they said, you know what, we need to send the engineers to the Mojave Desert.

There was one, I think this was towards the tail end of the trip.

They took us to a site. They gave us a map.

And they said, okay, you are now the rover. And this is the only information that you have.

These are just images, aerial images of the area nearby. Go tell us where you would find evidence of life.

It kind of made me think like, ah, like one day we could be walking on the surface of Mars and maybe doing the same exercise. So that was kind of cool.

This is NASA's curious universe.

I'm Patty Boyd, and in this podcast, NASA is your tour guide.

My name is Christina Hernandez, and I'm a payload systems engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Christina is one of the engineers that helped build the Mars Perseverance Rover,

which will soon allow us to explore Mars in a way we've never been able to before.

Ever wonder if there's life beyond our home planet?

Some key answers might be locked up a little further into the solar system on Mars.

And over the past few years, NASA's been building a rover that might just hold the key.

When I started, we were still at a paper design.

And we were just focused on trying to understand if it was the right design

and how we were actually going to build this beast of a rover.

And now, right, in the recent years,

we've transitioned to what I love the most about engineering

now is, you know, building hardware, testing hardware, and eventually building the flight

rover and flight instruments.

...