Have you ever heard of Mimi Aung? She is a Burmese American engineer who went to work for NASA after pursuing her goals of becoming an engineer and finding a love for space science.

Mimi was born in America in 1968, where her parents were going to school, but traveled back to Myanmar (Burma) when she was just two years old. Mimi’s mother was the first woman from Myanmar to get a doctorate in mathematics.  

While in school Mimi learned a lesson that she has said defined her life at NASA. She asked her mother for help on a math problem. With math being something her mother excelled greatly at; Mimi got tired of her mother’s explanation of how to solve the problem. She told her mother she just wanted the answer. Her mother responded with a quote that would stick with Mimi for a long while after ... 

“Never, never ask me 

for a shortcut.” 

ဘယ်တော့မှ ဖြတ်လမ်းကို ဘယ်တော့မှ မတောင်းဘူး။

Burmese translation of quote

When Mimi was 16, she moved back to the United States. She lived with friends and family while she finished school. She graduated high school and went to the same college her parents attended, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she majored in electrical engineering.  

After finishing college, Mimi went on to work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA. She continued to work in the electrical engineering field but spent a lot of time focusing on space science. That is where her real passion started to come to life.  

After working at NASA for some time, Mimi became the lead engineer for Mars helicopter technology. She spent time with her team trying to work out a way to get a small aircraft to land on Mars.  

The biggest problem Mimi and her team kept running into was that their craft had to be able to make it to Mars and navigate (find its way around) on its own. The small helicopter they were trying to build would not have a pilot! 

Mimi and her team were eventually successful in their mission! They created Ingenuity.