NASA Perseverance Mars Rover directed from Lewisham apartment above hair salon

Tucked away above a hairdresser in south London, a makeshift NASA office is looking for life on Mars.

The Lewisham unit Sanjeev Gupta has made his office is located above a hairdresser’s salon. Picture: Google Street View

A NASA professor is controlling the Mars rover Perseverance on the Red Planet from a one-bedroomed flat above a hairdresser.

Sanjeev Gupta, 55, should be at mission control in California but like many others, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced him to work at home – in Lewisham, south London.

The Lewisham unit Sanjeev Gupta has made his office is located above a hairdresser’s salon. Picture: Google Street View

NASA professor Sanjeev Gupta turned the unit into an office to avoid disrupting his family.

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Prof Gupta told the Daily Mail: “I should be at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, in a series of offices each one about three times bigger than this lounge, full of hundreds of scientists and engineers with their heads buried in laptops surrounded by large screens.

“NASA’s headquarters is certainly a far cry from a one-bedroom flat.”

Prof Gupta is one of the leading scientists on the $A5.4 billion life-on-Mars mission.

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NASA workers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California celebrate the successful landing of the Perseverance Rover on Mars. Picture: Bill Ingalls/NASA/AFP

NASA’s Mars rover Perseverance just before landing on Mars. Picture: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The parachute that slowed the rover’s descent had some hidden messages in binary code to make the parachute easy to orientate. Picture: Lizabeth Menzies/NASA/AFP

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The geology expert at London’s Imperial College and his colleagues will begin directing Perseverance to spots to drill for samples which will then be transported back to Earth in 2027 by a separate UK-backed project.

He added: “The teenage son of a friend of mine asked me if I could order the rover to do a wheelie for him.

“I told him, ‘Not with my motoring skills’.”

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The Perseverance Rover in the Jezero Crater on February 21. Picture: NASA/JPL-Caltech / AFP

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Many of the 400 scientists are working from home because of travel restrictions that have been imposed during the third wave of the COVID pandemic.

But because he has to work through the night, Prof Gupta has rented an apartment in Lewisham so his wife and children can enjoy undisturbed sleep in the nearby family home.

His flat has been turned into a nerve centre with five computers and two other screens for Zoom-style meetings with fellow scientists.

Along with his team, he is working round the clock as a Mars day is 40 minutes longer than a day on Earth.

This article originally appeared on The Sun and was reproduced with permission.