NASA's Palestinian Engineer Gets Ready to Make History Once Again

Palestinian electrical engineer Loay Elbasyouni, who was part of the NASA team which sent the Perseverance spacecraft to Mars last month, has returned to prominence as the space agency prepares for the first helicopter flight on Mars later this morning. NASA's Ingenuity Mars helicopter is just a few hours away from making humanity's first attempt at controlled flight of an aircraft on another planet.

Elbasyouni is the electronics lead for the helicopter which was landed recently on the Red Planet. If this mission is a success, he and the NASA team will write their names in the history books, just as the Wright brothers did in 1903 with their first powered aircraft flight. Uniquely, though, the NASA project is taking place well beyond the Earth's atmosphere.

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