Mars Rover Engineer
Watch Jaime Catchen, Mars Rover Systems Engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), share how she begins each morning reviewing data from the rover Curiosity‘s experiments from the previous day. Curiosity receives commands and instructions from engineers like Jaime, each day to carry out its activities and collect various planet samples. It is her responsibility to make sure that Curiosity stays healthy and is able to safely perform all of the tasks assigned to it. One of the most fun parts of her job is helping to plan the rover's driving, because they get to put on their 3-D glasses to study the Mars terrain and decide which rocks are safe to drive over and how to best position the rover to carry out its mission for the day.