At age 12, Eduardo Bendek wanted to control a motor with a computer. He was missing a component he couldn’t afford—until a stranger in the same store decided to give it to him. Thanks to that gesture, he was able to finish his invention and discovered that an idea can take a different path when someone decides to believe in it.
That curiosity took him from studying engineering at the Catholic University and the Paranal Observatory all the way to NASA. For 15 years, he worked on the coronagraph for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, a technology capable of creating small artificial eclipses to block starlight and search for planets around systems such as Alpha Centauri, the closest to Earth.
Perhaps that is the best way to understand his story. Eduardo Bendek never stopped looking up at the sky with curiosity; he learned to build instruments to explore it. And from Chile all the way to NASA, he proved that Chileans are also playing a part in addressing humanity’s biggest questions.
Sources: La Tercera, Visión Universitaria.
