On April 19, 2021, the autonomous NASA helicopter Ingenuity (nicknamed Ginny) lifted off the surface of Mars for what turned out to be a flight of 39.1 seconds. While decidedly brief, this ascent was also historic because it made Ingenuity the first aircraft to carry out a powered, controlled extra-terrestrial flight. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a research and development center that is managed by the California Institute of Technology, took the lead in designing and building this space vehicle. A JPL engineer named MiMi Aung served as the manager of this ambitious project.
Aung was born in Illinois in 1968. Both of her parents were from Myanmar, a Southeast Asian country officially known as Burma until 1989. Her mother Hla Hla Sein had the distinction of being the first woman from Myanmar to receive a doctorate in mathematics; in addition, she was the first female citizen of that country to receive any kind of doctorate in the United States.
When MiMi Aung was only two-and-half-years old, she and her family left the United States to live instead in Myanmar. They relocated again when she was 11, this time moving to Malaysia. Five years later, Aung’s parents made arrangements for her to return to Illinois to stay with friends in Illinois and also further pursue her education. Aung ultimately graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) with a bachelor’s degree and then a master’s degree in electrical engineering.
By the time she completed her studies a UIUC, Aung had developed strong interests in both mathematics and deep space exploration. These interests led her seek a career at JPL, which she later called “the place for first-of-a-kind missions — missions that nobody has done before — to get the kinds of science that we’ve never gotten.” Aung also stated, “I remember telling one of the interview managers, ‘I can do this, I could do that . . .’ And he made a comment saying, ‘Gee, you’re like a kid in a candy store.’”
Aung eventually brought this same level of enthusiasm, along with a wealth of technical expertise, to her leadership role in the project responsible for the development of Ingenuity. “What I find most rewarding and challenging about the work I do is the chance to develop never-been-done-before autonomous systems for space exploration,” she noted during the course of this project.
In designing that space vehicle, JPL collaborated extensively with defense contractor AeroVironment as well NASA’s Silicon Valley-based Ames Research Center and Virginia-based Langley Research Center. In addition, several key parts of Ingenuity were provided by Qualcomm; SolAero; and Lockheed Martin Space. To underscore Ingenuity’s significance in the annals of aviation, this helicopter carried a piece of fabric from a wing of the plane used by the Wright Brothers in 1903 for the world’s first controlled, powered, and sustained heavier-than-air human flight.
Aung, who now works as director of technical program management at Kuiper Systems (a subsidiary of Amazon), has been highlighted and honored in several major ways for her accomplishments. BBC named her one of the top 100 women in the world in 2019, for example, and Time magazine selected her for its annual list of the 100 most influential people in 2021. In 2022, Aung was inducted as a member of the National Academy of Engineering. That same year, she received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Illinois for her “technical contributions and innovation in spacecraft, autonomy in space and for leadership on the NASA helicopter Ingenuity.”
Photo Credit: Public Domain
For more information on MiMi Aung, please check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiMi_Aung
A video featuring her is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3k0RGNDzf4
Transportation History 