By Harper Cuttino

High fives are exchanged and cheers fill the room as Perseverance touches down on the surface of Mars on Feb. 18, 2020. Image credit: FOX 10 Phoenix via YouTube/NASA. 

On February 18, 2020, I remember scanning the livestream of the NASA control room in search of white pants. My stepmother had told me to keep an eye out for a woman wearing white pants and patriotic American flag Vans. My father, stepmother, brother and I huddled behind my dad’s monitor as we watched NASA’s Perseverance rover make its descent onto Mars. After several moments of anxiously waiting, the confirmation of Perseverance’s touchdown sent the control room into immediate celebration. In the front of the screen, I was finally able to see the person I was searching for: Chlöe Sackier, my stepsister. 

I remember being so excited, for one, that I had witnessed a tremendous accomplishment in space exploration, and second, that I knew someone there. Sackier is one of the smartest people I know, especially when it comes to science. Therefore, whenever I am given the opportunity to talk about anything science or space-related, she is my first resource. I wasn’t as close with Sackier when I was younger, as our age gap is more than a few years, and by the time I was in Middle School, she was already in California, while I was still in Virginia. But as I grew, I got to know her more. I am very thankful for all the stories she has told me about her journey to NASA and the experiences she’s had while working there. 

Before Sackier’s love of aerospace engineering developed, her sights were set on one thing during her childhood: becoming an astronaut. Sackier grew up in Charlottesville, Virginia, and as she grew she gained an interest in space. The initial exposure of this field of work originated from an experience at a child’s birthday party. The birthday party consisted of a Star Trek theme and had various elements that pertained to space. While in reality the setting was inside a Chuck E.Cheese, it was convincing enough to spark Sackier’s interest into space travel: “I was fully convinced that it was actually real, and then I was convinced that ‘This wasn’t as hard as they make it out to be.’” This party inspired Sackier to become an astronaut. 

Chlöe Sackier. Photo credit: Chlöe Sackier.

From that experience onward, Sackier began searching for more knowledge on the field of space exploration. In that process of discovery, she found herself starting to shift from wanting to be an astronaut and more towards being an aerospace engineer. When Sackier was in high school, she participated in the Virginia Space Grant Consortium (VASTS) to continue studying aerospace engineering. The program she entered focused on different types of lab-based scenarios and hands-on activities. Some of the simulations focused on designing equipment for extra-terrestrial travel and living, and Sackier was also assigned during those mock missions to be the EDL specialist. EDL stands for Entry Descent and Landing and specializes in exactly what it sounds like: the focus of preparing machinery or humans for descent into space or foreign planets. VASTS helped with solidifying what Sackier hoped to achieve. From there, she was set on becoming an EDL specialist at NASA.

After graduating high school from Saint Anne’s-Belfield School in Charlottesville, she went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston in pursuit of a degree in aerospace engineering. “[MIT] felt like engineering Hogwarts to me,” Sackier recalls, “I remember visiting the campus and falling in love with it.”  

Sackier graduated from MIT and went on to intern at JPL  (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) in Pasadena, California. JPL focuses on the robotic engineering process for NASA. What sets JPL apart from the other NASA centers is the specialization of engineering that contributes to space exploration through robotics. The lab was created in 1936 by Theodore von Kármán, a well known Caltech professor, and its purpose was to encourage engineering advancements for those interested in rockets or jets. The lab began to associate with NASA in 1958, and it switched from Army jurisdiction studies to becoming a new civil space agency. Since then, JPL has carried out numerous missions in conjunction with NASA, including the contining Mars exploration programs. 

On Sackier’s first day in Pasadena for her internship, she was immediately sent back on a plane up to Northern California to observe the testing of a supersonic parachute at the Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. The Ames Research Center is one of ten field research labs of NASA and is home to the world’s largest wind tunnel. According to the NASA website, Ames Research Center also contains, “NASA’s fastest supercomputers, an arc jet facility for re-entry and the world’s largest motion based flight simulator.”  Sackier followed her boss, engineer Al Chen, through the lab and then to the area in which she could view the test. Sackier recalls that first experience: “We walked through the control rooms and then under the wind tunnel… And then [Al] pointed to this ladder and said ‘Go climb that.’…And there’s this tiny little peephole that kind of bulged out into the tunnel, and I just watched the test from inside the window.” The test she witnessed that day would later influence her work at NASA for the Perseverance rover.  

NASA’s Mars program focuses on searching for signs of life on Mars, former environmental conditions on the planet, and also preparing for the possibility of human exploration of Mars. Therefore, JPL has been focusing on the creation of various rovers to collect samples from Mars. Previous missions, such as Spirit and Opportunity, both launched in 2003, were designed to explore the surface of Mars to produce a map of the terrain and look for earlier signs of life on the planet.  

Similar to Spirit and Opportunity, Perseverance was launched in 2020 for the purpose of collecting samples of Martian soil and rock in search of signs of ancient life. Sackier is a part of the team that was focused on the EDL equipment for Perseverance. In particular, the main focus was testing the parachute for the rover. While the atmosphere for Mars is recorded to be relatively thinner than Earth’s, the immense amount of air density makes it easy for materials to rip in the descent. The main components that needed to be monitored were the weight of the parachute and the act of surviving the mass kinetic forces when the rover entered the Martian atmosphere. Then the design has to go through multiple stages of testing that involve using the Ames wind tunnel for landing simulations . After the final details and experiments were completed, Perseverance was set to launch on February 18, 2020.

The Perseverance rover takes a selfie on Mars. Photo credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

On launch day, Sackier sat among her coworkers anxiously awaiting the signal Perseverance would hopefully report back once it had pierced the sound barrier of Mars. This is known as the “seven minutes of terror” and is often referred to that way due to the lack of control the engineers have on ensuring the landing. When the rover began to break through the Martian atmosphere, the rover had to complete this section of the journey on its own, and since it is moving so fast (around 12,500 mph), there is a gap in messaging radio signals from Mars to Earth, making it harder to control. “It was very scary. Very exciting, but very scary,” Sackier recalls. “We practiced these events years in advance, but once you’re actually in that moment, years of hard work turn into just one moment.” 

Fortunately, Perseverance survived the seven minutes of terror and sent the radio signal to the control room, as well as providing video footage of its descent onto the Jezero Crater. Now began the second part of the mission: samples could now be collected and researched through Perseverance, and the mission would start its second phase of building machinery to get the samples back to Earth. Sackier is currently working on the second half of the mission to create another rover/machine to retrieve those samples. 

Sackier plans on finishing off the Perseverance mission and focusing on Mars. Sackier says, “For now, I’m interested in the Mars world. I have the need for closure [for the project]. I worked on the delivery [of the rover], and now I’m working on getting it back, just for a full circle moment.” There are certainly other missions where JPL will be focusing on more exploration of our solar system. Missions such as the possibility of human habitation on planets are in motion as research on Mars continues. A more recent mission that Sackier described is the journey of the Europa Clipper. Europa is Jupiter’s icy moon, and the current goal is for the Europa Clipper to investigate if life is possible under the surface of Europa. 

As of now, Sackier continues to work on the Mars EDL retrieval mission, and she continues to also explore in her free time. Sackier’s permanent residence is in California, but she still takes the time to explore various countries all over the world. With space exploration being a passion of hers, she also is an avid enjoyer of exploring our planet Earth. I had asked Sackier what she had planned on doing after Perseverance had landed and after the retrieval aspect finished. Sackier replied with, “Get to the top of the mountain, turn around, and find the next one to climb.”