Mindy Park

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
Despite arguments otherwise, Andy Weir has not issued clear-cut descriptions of most of the characters; but while Weir has stated that he pictured her as Korean and Park is a Korean surname, he has also said, "Whatever ethnicity she has, she’s an American and her family has been in America forever, which is why her first name is just Mindy, but her last name is Park. But Park is also a British surname so the casting people [could have] thought Mackenzie Davis looks like someone descended from Brits." However, the Asian erasure controversy was further amplified by the changes made to Venkat Kapoor.