STAB Alum on NASA Rover Team Holds Zoom With Former Science Teacher

ALBEMARLE COUNTY, Va. (WVIR) - A Saint Anne’s Belfield alum will be responsible for making sure NASA’s Perseverance rover completes its journey to Mars successfully later this month.

Chloe Sackier, a 2014 graduate of STAB, discussed the Mars 2020 program in a zoom interview Monday night with Bob Troy, her former science teacher at STAB.

She says she always knew she wanted to work in aerospace, beginning with when she used to drag her mom out of bed in the middle of the night to watch rocket launches from wallops island.

“If you’re at a high enough vantage point and it’s night time you can see these sounding rocket launches, like from the Charlottesville area, which is so, so cool” said NASA engineer Chloe Sackier. “So I used to wake my mom up and drag her out in the middle of the night and be like ‘look, you see that tiny light in the distance? That’s a rocket’. So that interest and fascination was always there”.

The Perseverance Rover completes its journey to Mars on February 18.

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