NASA’s Azeri engineer dreams of flying to Mars

Interview with Allen Mirkadyrov, a native of Baku who’s involved in NASA’s Mars exploration project. 

- Please, tell us a little bit about yourself. Where were you born and raised? Where did you go to school?

- I was born in Baku on May 5, 1979. My family lived in Tofiq Abbasov Street, in the 8th-kilometer neighborhood. I went to school No 145 and studied there until the sixth grade. I have a sister and three brothers. In 1991, my family moved to the US. We lived in several US states, including Arizona, Hawaii, Colorado, California and Maryland. I still have relatives and close friends in Baku. I try to visit Baku every year or so to meet them.      

As for my education, I have a bachelor’s degree in space technology from the US Air Force Academy. I also did master’s in airspace technology at San Diego State University.  

After university, I worked for the US Air Force for ten years. In 2010, I got a job at NASA as an airspace engineer, who looks after the security of NASA’s orbital missions. I still work for NASA. 

- Why did you choose this profession, which is quite unusual for a regular Azerbaijani? What was your motivation? 

- I chose this profession because I wanted to become a cosmonaut, or an astronomer, as it’s called in the USA. I worked for many years to achieve this goal. 

- Tell us about the mission you are currently involved in? What do you hope to get personally from this extraordinary experience? 

- The mission, HI-SEAS 3, is designed to obtain as much information as we can about the cohesion and performance of a crew during the simulation of an eight-month flight to Mars. My job during this mission is to model several astronomical events that can potentially occur during an actual mission to Mars in the future, and to optimize an Earth-Mars-Earth trajectory, using special software called Systems Tool Kit. 

For instance, I have to simulate a real astronomical event, which will take place in the solar system in 2084 - the transit of Venus across the solar disk - and display it with the help of computer simulations. 

I hope to get from this mission as much technical and psychological experience as I can. This experience will one day help me take part in an actual mission to Mars.  

- What are your plans after the completion of this mission? If you had the chance of flying to Mars, would you use it? 

- After this mission, I will return to my job at NASA, where I worked as an airspace engineer at a test site in Wallops Island, Virginia. My plans for the future will remain mostly unchanged. My main goal is participate in space missions as an astronomer. I will continue to achieve this goal. If I had the chance to fly to Mars, I would not hesitate for a minute to use it.

Note: This interview was originally published by haqqin.az in Russian.

Bakudaily.Az