Christina Hernández is a Mexican-American aerospace engineer. Fascinated by space since childhood, she studied aerospace engineering at California Polytechnic State University, earning both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in 2013. Hernández joined NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) working in the Natural Space Environments group, and as mission assurance manager for STABLE, a balloon-based technology project. Later, she joined the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission as a payload systems engineer, ensuring the rover’s scientific instruments were prepared to operate on the Martian surface. Following her work on Perseverance, Hernández served as a flight systems engineer for the NASA mission exploring the metal-rich asteroid Psyche. Hernández is an advocate for Latinas and other underrepresented groups in STEM. In 2021, she was honored with a Hispanic Heritage Foundation STEM Award.
