A lecture for students with Ms. Anne Devereaux, Spacecraft System Engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the lead flight System engineer for the Mars 2020 Rover, as the chief speaker was hosted jointly by Science City and the American Center, Kolkata.
Ms. Devereaux has worked on the Mars Science Laboratory, Curiosity Rover project and she was the Deputy Lead for the Entry, Descent and Landing team. Subhabrata Chaudhuri, director, Science City said that when all Indians were anxious about the fate of landing of Vikram rover on the moon, Ms Devereaux was also waiting with bated breath.
After the event, she sent a massage: “I just wanted to let your team back in India know that myself and lot of my colleagues have been watching the landing coverage of Chandrayaan-2 with great interest.
Though it looks like there might have been problems, there’s of course always hope. And we humans always learn things, even from our failures.
I was going to suggest I would be happy to work in some thoughts on times NASA and JPL have had failures and how we learned from them and ultimately get better – and that we all learn from each other as well.”
Speaking at the American Center, Ms Devereaux said, “The Indian scientists did very well. A lot of information (was) gathered. The orbiter has been successful”.
She hoped for future collaboration with Indian Institutions like ISRO. Meanwhile, Monica Shie, director, US Consulate General, Kolkata said that the American Centre would love to collaborate with Science City in future too.