If We Ever Find Life on Mars, You Can Thank Nagin Cox

Nagin Cox wants to make sure someone has wished you a “happy ‘landiversary.’”

Where she works, it’s an event akin to New Year’s or the Fourth of July, though it has more to do with rockets than fireworks. Cox is a tactical mission lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the organization responsible for getting the Perseverance rover to the surface of Mars on Feb. 18, 2021. The rover has one historic and unprecedented task: To look for signs of ancient life on Mars. During a whirlwind of festivities marking the first anniversary of the landing, Cox took a quiet moment to rewatch NASA’s compilation of reactions to the rover’s flawless touchdown. “I just got so teary-eyed,” she told me over a recent video call from JPL in southern California. “If no one has wished you a happy landiversary yet, happy landiversary!”

It’s impossible not to get emotional watching the video of the landing, which combines real-time commentary of the rover’s perilous descent through the Martian atmosphere, with shots of people (mostly children) watching rapt as the rover’s camera pushes through thick clouds of orange dust to reveal the rocky red surface of Mars. But Perseverance—or Percy, as she’s known around the JPL campus—inspires deep feelings in Cox, who is part of a team that watches over the rover like parents with a child.

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“Basically while [Percy is] asleep, we are planning her activities for the next day,” said Cox. Perseverance has so many instruments, cameras, and components that planning out what each of them do every day can be challenging to do in a small time frame. Cox and others on the rover’s leadership team “are responsible that we get through our limited timeline and get something to Perseverance so she’ll know what to do in the next sol,” she said. Already, they’ve led the rover toward some historic achievements, like setting records for the longest distance traveled by a rover in a Martian day (1,050 feet) and the fastest drive on Mars (393 feet per hour), and collecting six rock cores and a sample of the Martian atmosphere to be evaluated back on Earth.

Working on a rover’s sleep schedule requires absolute, unmitigated commitment. Cox, who is also a tactical mission lead for Percy’s older sibling rover, Curiosity, often works on Mars time. On this schedule, shifts start 40 minutes later every day to accommodate the longer Martian day, or sol, which is 24 hours and 37 minutes long.

Lately, Perseverance has been especially busy embarking on a dangerous three-mile journey toward an ancient river delta in the Jezero crater, where water once flowed into a massive lake—an ideal location to seek out signs of ancient alien life. Once she gets there, she will use her robotic arm and built-in drill to collect and store more rock core samples that will be returned to Earth at a later date.

In addition to having an unusual work schedule, being on Mars time also means drawing all the curtains at home in the morning to coordinate with the Martian night, and asking your family to bear with it. It used to mean wearing two wristwatches for each planet she inhabited (now there’s an app for that). It means referring to the day before as “yestersol,” and self-identifying as a Martian.

Cox wouldn’t have it any other way: “It’s just a dream job.”

When Cox started working at NASA nearly 30 years ago, she was already prepared for the rover life. This resolve was forged during a childhood set in Kansas City in a first-generation Indian-American household in the 1970s. For a young woman with big dreams, the environment was stifling. Cox’s father expected boys to learn math and science and girls to cook and clean the house. But Cox, buoyed by the endless possibilities impressed upon her by Star Trek and Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and the inclusivity that the burgeoning U.S. space program seemed to foster, pushed back against her father’s beliefs. Concepts like sexism and racism “are not innate,” she said. “You learn them.” Her mother’s quiet encouragement fostered her conviction that “we could choose not to proceed in a way that separated us.”

Cox set her mind to pursuing a career in space exploration, which she saw as her ticket out of an unbearable situation. A scholarship from the U.S. Air Force helped her leave home and earn an engineering degree at Cornell University, which later led to a job and master’s degree in space operations engineering with the Air Force. But working at NASA was always her end goal, and in 1993 she got her first job at the agency as a systems engineer at JPL.

Compared to the “boys’ environment” of the Air Force, said Cox, NASA seemed to abound with female employees. Still, the gender balance was—and continues to be—way off. Today, only about 15 percent of American engineers are women, and just 35 percent of NASA’s employees are female. When shifts are staffed entirely by women, “it’s still something to note and talk about,” said Cox.

Occasionally, these employees face the same obstacles women in workplaces everywhere face; namely, being talked over and not being heard. During high-pressure moments like launches and landings, “people’s social skills—and communication skills—might slip a little,” said Cox. It’s important to speak up about those experiences because other women might be feeling the same thing, she said. “As soon as we all validated that we’d been experiencing something similar, then in many ways, what to do next was obvious.”

Cox shared the wisdom she has accumulated over a decades-long career to set her female colleagues up for success. “She’s worked in mission operations for a long time and takes her lessons learned as a way to guide those who are coming along. She always provides a hand up,” said Theresa Rosette, who recently worked under Cox as a systems support engineer for Perseverance.

For others, Cox has come to represent the possibilities that Carl Sagan and Star Trek once symbolized for her. “It’s hard to be what you cannot see, so as a young woman in engineering, Nagin is an absolute inspiration for many of us,” said Alyssa Deardorff, a systems engineer at JPL who works with Cox on managing Perseverance’s daily activities.

Her influence extends beyond NASA’s campuses to schools and community centers around the world, where Cox gives talks on women’s rights, teaches women’s self-defense, and encourages students to pursue STEM careers, even if their circumstances make that seem impossible. “It doesn’t do any good to be a recruiting person for NASA when you’re someplace where opportunities like that might be difficult,” she said.

Instead, she reminds students that all humans “share the same sky.” She uses this concept to underscore the importance of perspective. “There are so many forces out there that are telling us what we should think—as women, given our nation, given our ethnic loyalties,” she said. “Everyone has a right to exercise their own thought processes and come to their own opinion about what matters.”

Cox is currently on modified Mars time, which progressively syncs closer to Earth’s clock, allowing engineers to wean off the demanding seven-day work schedule that Percy’s care requires. Around the rover’s landiversary, Cox got her weekends back, which she promptly used to schedule catch-ups with loved ones. By now, with Cox having worked on three of NASA’s four rover missions to Mars, her family and friends are used to it. In the year of launch, the year of landing, and the year after, they know what to say, Cox laughed: “Bye Nagin, have fun on Mars!”