A R T S A N D C U LT U R E Jason Achilles Mezilis reached for the stars by combining science and music.
SEEING
Stars JASON ACHILLES MEZILIS FINDS SECOND CAREER IN SPACE BY CHRISTINA FUOCO-KARASINSKI
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hen Jason Achilles Mezilis saw the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover land safely, he admits, with a laugh, that he cried like a baby. He had reason to, though. The Studio City, California, musician worked with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena to perfect Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover’s microphone used to record sounds inside the 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) Jezero Crater. “Music was always a dream,” Mezilis says. “It was an attainable dream. Space is rad, but I didn’t think it would ever be a real thing. The last number of years, though, I thought, ‘Maybe it can be a thing.’” Encouraged by Arizona State University (ASU) professor Jim Bell, Mezilis made both of his dreams come true. “Jim Bell was one of my main guys who said, ‘Don’t worry. You can do this,’” Mezilis says. “Weirdly enough, he was right.” Mezilis connected with NASA by banging on doors and rattling cages, he says with a laugh. He broke through after pitching David Gruel (assembly, test and launch operations manager for Mars Perseverance at JPL) his concepts for informing a working audio selection, largely based on his work as an audio engineer for the past decade. “When I was hired as a consultant for JPL in 2017, I had to incorporate because they couldn’t hire me as an individual,” Mezilis says. “I had to start a company, Zandef Deksit Inc. Since then, we’ve been developing an idea for this selfie cam for rocket land-
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