What it takes to get a job building robotic Mars explorers for NASA

After a thankfully uneventful seven-month journey, NASA's Mars 2020 mission is set to safely reach the Red Planet and insert itself into orbit on Thursday ahead of deploying the Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter prototype that it's been toting down to the planet's surface in search for evidence of ancient microbial life. However, this expedition has been in the works for far longer than Perseverance has been travelling through interplanetary space. First announced in 2012, the mission marks the culmination of nearly a decade's work by hundreds of machinists, designers, rocket scientists and engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab. But not just anyone can get hired there, working for the world's premiere spacecraft production facility and building equipment that will grace the surfaces of neighboring planets. For Mohamed Abid, a Deputy Chief Mechanical Engineer on the Mars 2020 mission, the path to working at the JPL began in Tunisia, where he grew up.