Ghanaian Engineer Behind NASA' Robotic arm
Meet the Ghanaian engineer behind NASA’s robotic arm for Mars Source : CNN 22 February 2021 9:44am Standing at the porch of his house in Ghana, as a young boy, Ashitey Trebi-Ollennu was fascinated by the planes that flew in and out of the airport. But his dreams were not to be a pilot, his imagination was more unique than that. He envisioned a future where robots would fly the planes. “I was fascinated by replacing human pilots with computers. I was very interested in that as a young kid.” Many years after, the young dreamer has surpassed his imagination. He is now a lead engineer on InSight – NASA’s spacecraft which recently landed on Mars. He is in charge of the mission’s robotic arm mechanism. What does the robotic arm do? The goal of InSight is to understand how planets are formed. But to do so, there is need to look deep beneath the surface. “You have to look at the core of the planet,” says Ollennu, Instrument Deployment Systems Lead on I...