In July 1997, Aimee Quon saw NASA’s Sojourner Mars Rover on the cover of Time Magazine and had a passing thought: Wouldn’t it be cool to work on that? Fast forward to April 2021, and the Mars Helicopter Ingenuity made its first successful flight on Mars…with Quon serving as the mission’s chamber test engineer.
Growing up in Houston near the Johnson Space Center, Quon (M.S. ME 2007) always had an interest in space but wasn’t sure exactly how she wanted to be involved. While earning her master's degree at UT Austin, she fortuitously met with an on-campus recruiter from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), securing a job working for the group that had inspired her all those years ago. Upon her graduation, she began her work at JPL with the Mars Science Laboratory on the Mars Curiosity Rover.
In 2014, the engineers at JPL were purposed with a simple question: Can you achieve enough lift to fly on Mars? With the atmosphere on Mars being so thin compared to Earth’s atmosphere, it becomes very difficult to achieve liftoff. To prove that it was possible, the Mars Helicopter, named Ingenuity, was born. And, after nearly seven years of impressive work, Quon was asked to join the Mars Helicopter project.
