National Hispanic Heritage Month: Elio Morillo, Aerospace Engineer

Elio Morillo, an aerospace engineer, was born in Ecuador. His interest in becoming an engineer took shape after he and his mother immigrated to New York City. Morillo found himself especially mesmerized in his younger years by TV footage of jets, spacecraft, and other types of flight technology.

After receiving his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering (with a minor in electrical engineering control systems) at the University of Michigan (U-M) in 2015, Morillo decided to pursue what had become his passion for space exploration. In 2017, he earned a master of engineering degree in systems engineering and design — with a specialization in spacecraft systems design — at U-M.

Morillo subsequent professional experience has included working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPO) as one of the engineers involved extensively in the NASA mission known as Mars 2020. He helped develop the autonomous helicopter Ingenuity (nicknamed Ginny) as part of this mission.

Along with serving as the operations mechanisms chair for the project responsible for Ingenuity, Morillo became the first person to fly a demo version of that helicopter. Ingenuity, which operated on Mars from 2021 to 2024, became the first aircraft deployed for a controlled extraterrestrial flight.

Morillo’s other accomplishments at JPO on behalf of Mars 2020 included helping to create Perseverance, a car-sized rover (remote-controlled motor vehicle). Perseverance has been in operation on Mars since 2020 to explore the planet’s Jezero crater. This vehicle has the distinction of being the most technologically advanced one ever sent to another planet.

Since 2023, Morillo has been working for the space technology company Blue Origin Enterprises, L.P. He started out there as a systems engineer and is now an avionics test manager.

Photo Credit: Larry D. Moore (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Nv8200pa) – licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en

For more information on Elio Morillo, please check out  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elio_Morillo