About Swati

Swati was born in Bengaluru India, and emigrated to the United States of America when she was one years old.  Her interest in space was inspired by watching Star Trek The Next Generation as a young child.    For most of her childhood, however, she wanted to be a pediatrician.  After taking her first Physics class, (due to a wonderful teacher), she switched focus to pursue engineering instead, with a focus in aerospace engineering.

Swati attended Cornell University and received her B.S. in 2004 in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.  After a brief stint working at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the Cassini mission, in 2004-2005, she went on to graduate school at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Aeronautics/Astronautics department.  Swati was a part of the Space Systems Laboratory, under the guidance of Dr. David Miller.  She worked on the SPHERES project for her thesis, and also helped the initial trial of the ZERO Robotics program.

She re-joined NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 2010 in the Guidance, Navigation, and Controls section.  Since then, Swati has worked on a number of missions, such as GRAIL, OCO-3, Mars 2020 Perseverance, and Psyche.   She is best known for being the voice of Entry, Descent, and Landing for Perseverance's landing on February 18, 2021.  She was the GNC lead and a Chief Engineer for the Psyche mission that recently launched October 13, 2023.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swati_Mohan

Resumes / CVs