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Mindy Park is a satellite communications engineer who works for NASA in SatCom. She once joked about being "Space Paparazzi" or an "Interplanetary Voyeur".

She monitors the satellites that are pointed at Mars and sends out emails as imagery becomes available. She has a master's degree in mechanical engineering which she often thinks is wasted at her current job. She works the 3 AM shift which she finds very dull and constantly drinks coffee to keep herself awake.

She was the first one to realise that Mark Watney was alive after seeing that the rover had moved from where Commander Lewis had said it was in her logs. She immediately found the contact details for and then called Kapoor as he was the Director of the Mars Mission.

It became her responsibility to redirect all the available satellites (12 NASA and 2 ESA) onto the ARES 3 site. She learnt Morse code so that she could read messages from Watney quickly without having to look up each letter and even changed her sleep pattern to match his driving times when Mark made his way to the Ares IV site.

Trivia[]

Mackenzie Davis' casting as Mindy Park in the film adaptation drew criticism from the Media Action Network for Asian-Americans (MANAA), due to the casting of a white actress when she was allegedly written as Korean-American. Contrary to MANAA's claim, Weir intentionally avoided giving the characters physical descriptions; however, in America "Park" is in fact a surname widely associated with Korean-American communities. Weir admitted in an interview addressing the controversy that he pictured Mindy as Korean-American, hence the use of "Park". He noted that "...Park is also a British surname so the casting people [could have] thought Mackenzie Davis looks like someone descended from Brits." [1] However, the Asian erasure controversy was further amplified by the changes made to Venkat Kapoor.

References[]

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