Meet 55-Year-Old Indian-Origin Professor Controlling NASA's Mars Rover From Home

Giving a new meaning to the ‘Work From Home’ culture, this Indian-origin British professor Sanjeev Gupta from Imperial College London is living in his apartment and operating Perseverance rover.

A resident of South London’s Lewisham, 55-year-old Sanjeev Gupta is a part of the team of scientists operating the Mars rover.

He has been using five computers and two other screens for video conferencing and has been controlling NASA’s Mars rover ‘Perseverance’ from his one-bedroom flat situated above a hair salon in South London.  

Sanjeev and his colleagues at NASA are going to operate the rover to drill samples which are then going to be carried back to Earth by another UK-based project in 2027.  

According to Mail Online, Gupta said, “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.”

The rover weighing 1,043 kilos will search and collect clues from Jezero crater, an ancient lake bed that may give any signs of past microbial life. Once back on Earth, Gupta will study the Martian rocks and sentiment samples to find answers regarding the Red planet’s geology and climate that will eventually pave the way for humans to explore civilisation on Mars.