The NASA’s flight director of the Mars Perseverance, Diana Trujillo, came to the US from Colombia at the age of 17.
As a kid in Cali, Colombia, Trujillo would often lie beneath the stars and gazed at the sky thinking ‘something has to be out there which is better than this’.
And, she was right, especially now when she’s the flight director of the NASA’s Perseverance Rover which recently successfully landed on Mars.
She Hopes that We Will Have the Answer soon
Trujillo who’s an aerospace engineer says that understanding whether we’re alone in the universe or not is the ultimate question. And, she hopes that within a year of the Rover’s operations on Mars, the answers will be available.
She’s one of the few Hispanic women who’re in this field and she’s never forgotten where she came from. Today, although at the top of the ladder in the aerospace world and working her dream job, she remembers her roots.
She grew up with the notion that it was a woman’s place to care for the men in the family and her mom actually left medical school when she met her father and became pregnant.
However, they divorced when she was 12. And, her mother was left with nothing, no money and no food.
They would boil eggs and cut them in half and it was their lunch for the day. This is when she would spend days looking at the sky thinking that there have to be other species that treat each other better and value each other.
Considering how much violence there is in Colombia, she says that looking at the stars was her safe place.
She Decides She Wants to Live Her Life on Her own Terms
At the age of 17, she decided to fly to Miami. She didn’t speak English and had only $300 to start the life she imagined for herself.
At first, in order to enrol in community college, she worked as a housekeeper and then transferred to the Florida University and majored in aerospace engineering.
She explains that she saw everything that came her way as an opportunity. She never taught ‘I can’t believe I’m cleaning a bathroom right now’ but more like ‘I’m glad to have a job and buy food and have a place to sleep’.
She believes her outlook on life made her who she is today-a person who looks at life in a different way.
She Becomes Part of NASA
Trujillo then applied for the NASA Academy during her senior college year and she was actually the first immigrant Hispanic woman to participate in the program.
She was also hired by them that year and in 2009, she became the telecom systems engineer for the Mars Curiosity Rover that landed on Mars in 2012.
As someone who saw the women in her family giving up a lot, she now has the tenacity to never give up on her dreams. And, she wants to show her family that women are important.
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