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NASA's 'Perseverance' Rover Has Launched, Will Hunt For Life On Mars

By Pablo Cabrera
Published Jul 30, 2020 5:20 AM
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This illustration depicts NASA's Perseverance rover operating on the surface of Mars. Perseverance will land at the Red Planet's Jezero Crater a little after 12:40 p.m. PST on Feb. 18, 2021. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
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NASA launched its Mars Rover "Perseverance" this morning from Cape Canaveral. A project like this requires a lot of people behind the scenes, and one of them is a native Angeleno.

"I grew up in South Central L.A. over in the Crenshaw area and went to school at Cal Poly Pomona, so I stayed an L.A. native basically my entire life," said Luis Dominguez, a Jet Propulsion Lab engineer with Mars 2020 who helped with the rover assembly:

"I originally got into engineering because I wanted to build airplanes and I was just fascinated by how airplanes worked and at some point in 7th grade I found out that aerospace engineers design and build airplanes so that kinda set my trajectory in life."

Dominguez says it's been a dream to be involved with Mars 2020.

The rover is expected to land on the red planet in February.

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