How an Indian-origin scientist is controlling NASA's Mars rover from his one-bedroom flat in London

Professor Sanjeev Gupta, a scientist with NASA has been controlling the Mars rover from his one-bed flat in South London

NASA's new robotic rover on Mars, Perseverance — the agency's most ambitious effort in decades to directly study whether there was ever life on the red planet — successfully landed on the planet’s Jezero Crater on February 18, 2021.

A lot of interesting facts about NASA’s Perseverance came out after it landed on Mars, but did you know that the US space agency’s $3 billion mission is being controlled by an Indian-origin doctor from his house in London?

Read | Perseverance rover sends film of descent, first audio from Mars

Professor Sanjeev Gupta, a scientist with NASA has been controlling the Mars rover from his one-bed apartment in South London, reported UK-based Daily Mail.

“I should be at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, in a series of offices each one about three times bigger than this lounge, full of hundreds of scientists and engineers with their heads buried in laptops surrounded by large screens,” he told the Daily Mail.

Were it not for the lockdown, the British geologist would have been alongside other scientists at the mission control in California. When he found out that he would not be able to go the US for the mission, he rented a place in Lewisham.

Read | Perseverance: A landmark mission

When the rover was landing on the red planet, the scientist was at it from his Lewisham nerve centre using five computers, two Macs, an iPad and two other screens for Zoom meetings with fellow scientists. His colleagues and he have been working round the clock to drill samples from the planet and transport them back to Earth.

Meanwhile, last week, NASA released a spectacular panoramic view of the landing site of the Perseverance rover on Mars.

About the size of an SUV, the rover weighs a ton, is equipped with a seven-foot-long (two-metre) robotic arm, has two microphones, and a suite of cutting-edge instruments to assist in its scientific goals.

'Nasa's headquarters is certainly a far cry from a one-bedroom flat... Still, it's a lovely little flat, even if it isn't the typical image of one of the nerve centres of space exploration,' Gupta told the publication.