Meet the NASA scientist responsible for overseeing Curiosity's successful landing

The World

Miguel San Martin remembers exactly when he decided he wanted to be a space engineer.

“It was on a cold winter’s night in 1976, looking up at the sky at my parent’s farm while I listened to the BBC on short wave, reporting the arrival of the Viking mission to Mars,” he said.

San Martin was 17 at the time and living in his native Argentina. Little did he know then that some two decades later he would be working on NASA’s next Mars project: the Pathfinder mission in 1997.

 NASA's Curiosity Lands on Mars
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