AEROSPACE ENGINEER
USA
BORN 1977 →
LANDING SAFELY ON OTHER WORLDS
Anita Sengupta has been surrounded by engineering her whole life. When growing up she enjoyed helping her dad fix things around the house. One day when the house had lost water pressure, after hunting for the source of the problem, Anita found a burst water pipe. Her dad said, “You’ll be a great engineer one day!” He was right.
Throughout her career, Anita has not been afraid to take risks and has grasped every opportunity, even if it hasn’t been what she was expecting or has been something she knew little about. Her first projects involved working on rocket engines. She ran computer simulations of how the gases and liquids would behave, including work on Space Shuttle fuel tanks.
One day, she was approached by the team developing Curiosity, a rover that would land on Mars. They needed help working out the parachute design and thought Anita would be just the person. It would involve dropping out of helicopters into the desert to test the parachutes. She didn’t know anything about parachutes, but figured she had the right skills and could learn on the job—plus it sounded like a lot of fun.
The Martian atmosphere is a hundred times thinner than Earth’s and the parachutes would open at supersonic speeds. All those that had been used on Mars previously had failed to work properly, but no one had figured out why. Anita and the team came up with a new design, tested it over and over again, and when Curiosity landed on Mars, the parachutes worked perfectly.
When NASA started developing the Orion, the next generation of spacecraft that will fly humans to the Moon and Mars, Anita could see they were going to have similar issues, as the reentry speeds were so high. She got in touch and offered her expertise. The program managers were delighted to have her knowledge and Anita came on board.
On Orion’s first test flight on December 5, 2014, all the key design elements, including the parachutes, worked perfectly. They slowed the spacecraft to splash down safely in the Pacific Ocean.
Anita’s latest project is leading the design, development and operations of an experiment that will fly to the International Space Station. The Cold Atom Laboratory is designed to study very cold quantum gases, testing some of the most fundamental laws of physics and observing phenomena not possible on Earth. She still seizes every opportunity, solving problems to push the limits of space exploration.
“There’s a job for you even though it’s a really tiny field. If this is what you want to do, and as long as you’re motivated and trained, you’ll get it.”