“Many people ask me: ‘How did a kid from Minas Gerais end up at NASA?’”, shared engineer Ivair Gontijo at the start of his talk, “From Dream to Space,” at the Side Events of the São Paulo Innovation Week (SPIW), a festival of innovation and entrepreneurship promoted by Estadão in partnership with Base Eventos, at CEU Heliópolis, this Saturday, the 16th.
In partnership with the City of São Paulo, SPIW meetings also take place inside CEUs, public facilities that promote access to culture, education and community life. The program runs this weekend, on the 16th and 17th, at four sites.
The softly spoken engineer who works at one of NASA’s leading laboratories left the rural interior of Minas Gerais, where he worked on farms until he was 18, and went to Belo Horizonte to study physics at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) – from there, he took the world by storm.
Ivair is part of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), NASA’s premier laboratory for robotic space missions. During the talk, he explained details of his work, which involved the construction of the Perseverance and Curiosity rovers, and the evolution of Mars missions, whose objective is to collect rock and soil samples and, in the future, bring them back to Earth for study.
Gontijo showed videos illustrating the processes of building the space rovers, and detailed Mars landings and how material is collected. After the technical portion, the engineer shared a tip that, according to him, he always gives to students in his talks: “Don’t make small plans and don’t have small dreams.”
His experience sparked the curiosity of the audience, who asked questions about mission timelines and how to bring the samples back for analysis on Earth. According to Ivair, the expectation regarding the samples is to use existing techniques today to try to determine whether Martian organic material was once part of life in the past or not.
“It could be that all life on Earth originated from Mars, it could be that a large meteor collided with the planet, landed here on Earth, and thrived here,” he speculated. “And it could also be that we came from another planet. There are many things to be discovered.”
But Ivair goes beyond the technical and pragmatic aspects, and issues a warning about expectations for space. According to him, even with advances in science and space exploration, we should not view progress on other planets as a refuge. Living on Mars, for now, exists only in science fiction.
“There is no plan B to leave this planet and survive on Mars,” he warns, advocating environmental conservation.
“It is millions of times cheaper and easier to solve the problems here. To go to Mars, we need to solve gigantic problems. How to produce oxygen? Food? And health and technological challenges? How are these problems solved? We have no solution,” he warns.
Still, he believes the possibility of humans going to Mars exists and is not that distant. “A crewed mission to Mars will take a long time, but I believe it will happen and that I will still see it in my lifetime.”
Sticking with the topic, and asked about the philosophical reasons for exploring space — that is, what humanity wants from it on a deeper level — he believes the answer is simpler than it seems.
“I don’t know where these studies will lead, but human beings are a curious creature. Where do we come from? We have deep questions about life, and we are the first generation to have the technology to answer such things.”
