Mars mission with a connection to Skye West Highland Free Press www.whfp.com – West Highland Free Press

A former NASA engineer from Portree now has a presence on Mars following the successful touchdown last week of the rover Perseverance.

Alexander MacRaes name was inscribed onto the robotic crafts metal frame by the Lifeboat Foundation, a think-tank dedicated to tackling existential risks to humanity such as the misuse of genetic engineering and artificial intelligence. He is a member of its futurist advisory board and had previously been contracted to NASA in the field of micro-electronics and communication, aspects of which were used in Perseverance.

Mr MacRae (86) was born on a croft at Budhmor and was gifted his boarding pass by Eric Klien, chief executive of the Lifeboat Foundation.

One of their main interests is to establish a human colony like Elon Musk is also involved in, he told the Free Press. Perseverances mission is to search for signs of ancient life, and it was a nice gesture for them to engrave my name on it. It was very tense in the last seven minutes, but a great relief that the precision and teamwork paid off.

Perseverance is an upgraded version of the Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars in 2012. One of the engineers who worked on it was Alexander Nicolson Mr MacRaes neighbour in Budhmor.

The former Portree High School pupil moved to Canada to work for Pratt & Whitney designing gas turbine engines. He moved to California, where he still lives, in 2005 to work in NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Regarding his work on Curiosity, Mr Nicolson said: The amount of testing was incredible, we often even had to retest the equipment that was used to test components and assemblies of the rover.

The biggest challenge on something like this is working out what the worst conditions the rover might have to overcome will be, in terms of the temperatures and forces it is likely to meet.

They are such big projects though. Overall it takes roughly 2,000 staff, hundreds of supplier companies and many thousands of tests in chambers designed to represent the conditions in space.

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Mars mission with a connection to Skye West Highland Free Press http://www.whfp.com - West Highland Free Press