A student who graduated from a Bibb County high school and is currently a rising senior at Georgia Tech is taking her skills to space.
WMAZ in Macon reported Breanna Ivey is interning at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. She will work on the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover.
“The goal of the rover is to discover past life, signs of past life on Mars. The way that it does that is it uses a robotic arm to drill holes into the surface, catch geological samples and save them for a later return mission,” Ivey said. “So one of the capabilities of that rover is it should be able to set a goal with some user input. I’m just making sure the math is right on the computer for the rover.
“My job is to make sure that the information that the computer sends back is correct and matches what we expect it to be.”
The internship will last until Aug. 7. It was initially set to be based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, but Ivey is working remotely due to COVID-19.
Ivey is pursuing a graduate degree in electrical engineering at Tech.
“When I was younger and I knew I wanted to build things, that’s all I knew. I didn’t know what that meant in terms of a job because I didn’t see anybody look like me doing the things that I thought were interesting,” Ivey said.
“Being able to impact people and see people be inspired by me just following my dreams and working hard, that really means a lot to me,” she added.
The Georgia Tech student hopes to work full time for NASA upon graduating.
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