In the early hours of April 19th 2021, MiMi Aung and her team at the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) NASA, waited with bated breath, to hear back about Ingenuity's first extraterrestrial, powered, controlled flight. At 6:46 am EDT , the team received the data they were eagerly waiting for - Ingenuity had successfully made its first flight on Mars for 39 seconds. It had taken off, hovered at about 10 feet, turned and then landed. As MiMi stood up and tore the contingency speech she had prepared incase the mission was unsuccessful, it was a moment of pure joy for her team as they had finally had their Wright Brothers moment!

MiMi Aung, a Burmese-American Engineer, was born in Illinois. She moved to Myanmar with her parents at the age of 2. She returned to the United States at the age of 16 and went on to study electronic engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Her mother was already a trail-blazer, being the first woman from Myanmar to hold a PhD. Aung loved Mathematics and under the tutelage of her mother, learnt various approaches to problem-solving at a young age.

After earning her master’s degree in electronic engineering, in 1990, Aung went to work for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, California. She worked on various projects related to the Deep Space Network and interplanetary spacecraft at JPL. In 2015, Aung was appointed to lead the Mars Helicopter Mission.

As project manager of NASA’s Mars Helicopter Project, Aung oversees the diverse team that designed, built, tested and flew Ingenuity. Ingenuity, the small 4 lb helicopter, designed to operate on Mars as a part of NASA's Mars 2020 program, is the first powered controlled flight by an aircraft on a planet besides earth, to take flight and land. There were many design challenges to overcome : the atmospheric density of Mars is only 0.01 times that of Earth and its gravity, only 1/3rd in comparison, making it difficult for an aircraft to generate adequate lift. To put things in perspective, Aung describes the elevation to be about three times the height of the Himalayas!

Ingenuity has been cleverly designed around these complex challenges. What makes it even harder is that the data has to travel hundreds of millions of miles resulting in a large lag. NASA engineers could neither control the flight from Earth nor observe it in real time. It was commendable that Ingenuity completed its successful flight autonomously!