Page 4 - MidWeek Kauai - April 14, 2021

4 KAUA‘I MIDWEEK APRIL 14, 2021
grades, I attended Future Flight Hawai‘i, which was a space camp on the Big Island,” he continues. “The first year I went with my dad for a few days and the second year I went alone for a week. We went out on the lava flows, sampled rocks and tested them for life. At the end, we gave a presentation to our families.”
alumnus of Punahou School. “When I heard the words ‘touchdown confirmed,’ there was just a flood of joy and relief. The high-definition photos and videos of the landing that were down- linked in the following days were
Eversincehewasyoung, Christopher Pong has made it a point to keep his eyes fixed on the skies and beyond.
Fast-forward to Feb. 18 of this year, and Pong’s job as a guidance and control engineer for NASA’s successful Perseverance rover landingonMarshasbecomethe fulfillment of a lifelong dream.
literally out of this world.” Specifically, Pong served as an attitude control engineer on the project. In that role, he helped esti- mate the attitude, or orientation, of the spacecraft using a sun sensor and star scanner, and assisted in firingthethrusterstoalterPerse-
(Top) Christopher Pong sports a dinosaur-themed mask during his participation in the Mars 2020 mission’s second trajectory correction maneuver at NASA’s Jet Propulsion LaboratoryinSouthernCalifornia.PHOTOCOURTESYNASA/JPLCALTECH
(Above) Pong at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Spacecraft Assembly Facility. PHOTO COURTESY CHRISTOPHER PONG
“Like many kids, I grew up wanting to be an astronaut,” recalls Pong, whose liftoff in life began in Kāneʻohe, where he attended Kapunahala Elementary School. “I would read about Albert Ein- stein and Stephen Hawking. I also watched Bill Nye the Science Guy.
craft cruises from Earth to Mars, it spins like a giant gyroscope. The spacecraft’s solar arrays and antennas are aligned with its spin axis, and therefore, attitude con- trol engineers need to periodically turn the spacecraft to keep them pointed close enough to the Sun and Earth. The spacecraft is also purposefully launched on a trajec-
tory that will miss Mars for plan- etary protection reasons.
protective wing of his big broth- er, Clinton, who today works as a Boston-based family doctor.
“There were such a variety of emotions that I felt that day — exhaustion from not sleeping well the night before and adren- aline to balance it out; fear that something may go wrong and we could lose the entire mis- sion. Those emotions just built and built as VIPs started enter- ing the room and the livestream started,” remembers Pong, an
verance’s flight pattern.
Pong explains that as the space-
Although he is currently work- ing at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, Pong’s interplanetary adventure has its beginnings in Hawai‘i.
“He likes to brag about me on Facebook. I was shy as a kid so he would speak for me — and this pattern still continues to this day,” acknowledges the 34-year- old Pong.
“Probably in third and fourth
Born to Randall Pong and May Akamine, Pong grew up under the