This Fil-Am engineer helped make NASA Perseverance rover’s Mars landing a success

Published February 19, 2021 8:27pm Filipino talent truly knows no bounds—it even transcends outer space! On Friday, the US Embassy in the Philippines shared that Filipino-American engineer Gregorio Villar was among the individuals behind the successful landing of NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars. Gregorio is the entry, descent and landing systems engineer of the Mars 2020 mission. According to his NASA profile, Gregorio studied high school in Baguio City before moving to the US where he finished a degree in Physics and went on to get a master’s degree in astronautical engineering at University of Southern California. He has been part of NASA’s jet propulsion laboratory team for over 12 years now and spent over 7.5 years building and testing a system that will help land a car-sized rover on Mars. The engineer has also directed a Mars parachute test campaign at the world’s largest wind tunnel. As a kid who grew up dreaming of becoming an astronaut, Gregorio shared that what made him excited about the Mars mission was the possibility that he could get there himself one day. NASA’s Perseverance rover, the “most advanced astrobiology laboratory ever sent to another world,” made its historic landing on Mars on Thursday. The rover’s primary aim is to search for possible fossilized signs of microbes that may have flourished on the red planet. Should the Perseverance rover successfully extract samples and have these sent back for analysis on Earth, the samples will be the first specimen to ever be collected by humans from another planet. – Kaela Malig/RC, GMA News

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