Diana Trujillo

As a lifelong Star Trek fan, I've been excited about the Mars Perseverance mission! NASA's quest is to "seek signs of ancient life." How will the rover retrieve rocks and soil? With a very cool robotic arm that Diana Trujillo, an aerospace engineer at NASA, helped create. She's our That Girl Friday! ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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When Diana arrived in the U.S., she did not speak English and had only $300. In NASA’s "From Colombia to Mars" video she said, "There was a lot of violence going on in my country, so for me, looking up at the sky and looking at the stars was my safe place." To afford community college and then the University of Florida, she worked as a housekeeper. She told CBS that while declaring her major, something caught her attention: a magazine featuring female astronauts. She decided to major in aerospace engineering. ⠀

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During her senior year of college, she applied to the NASA Academy. She told TechCrunch that she was the "first immigrant Hispanic woman" to join that prestigious program and she was one of two students NASA hired that year. In 2009, her journey to Mars officially started. She was a telecom systems engineer for the Mars Curiosity Rover, helping the rover land on the red planet in 2012.

Diana is proof that Representation Matters! She has consistently used her platform to uplift the next generation of Latinas in STEM. She recently hosted NASA's first-ever Spanish language broadcast of a planetary landing. The show was called “Juntos perseveramos,” or "Together we persevere." Her plan is working! There are currently more than 2 million views of her show.