By Chris Warren
Aaron Yazzie shares many of the questions a lot of us have about the planet Mars. “Mars was once similar to Earth,” he says. “It once had water and was warmer as an early planet. It developed over billions of years in similar ways to Earth, but the question is, why did Earth develop life and Mars didn’t? Or maybe it did?”
Like most of us, Yazzie likes to puzzle over these questions. But there’s a big difference in his ruminations — his work as an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., is instrumental in actually getting some answers. Yazzie, the winner of this year’s award for Technical Excellence, led a team that developed the Mars 2020 Sample Acquisition Drill Bit Assemblies, which are an integral part of the Sample Caching System aboard the Perseverance rover that landed on the red planet in February of this year (2021).
This article celebrates Aaron Yazzie, who led a team that developed tools to collect rock samples from Mars to bring back to Earth for research surrounding the development of life on this other planet. Yazzie was the 2021 AISES Technical Excellence Awardee and specifically wants to empower Native students to achieve similar things.
This article originally appeared on the AISES Winds of Change website and magazine in Fall 2021.
