Joy Crisp | |
---|---|
Born | |
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | Carleton College Princeton University |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Planetary science |
Institutions | Jet Propulsion Laboratory |
Joy A. Crisp is a planetary geologist specializing in Mars geology. She is noted for her work on NASA missions to Mars, including the Mars Exploration Rovers and Mars Science Laboratory. [1] [2]
Crisp was born in Colorado Springs, CO. She earned a bachelor's degree in geology from Carleton College in 1979, and both a Master's (1981) and a PhD (1984) from Princeton University. [3] Subsequently, Crisp was a postdoctoral researcher at UCLA for more than two years. Her studies involved investigating rocks from the Canary Islands under conditions similar to those within volcanoes. [1]
Crisp has been a researcher at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory since 1989. She has been a principal scientist there since 2004. Crisp has worked on numerous projects and NASA missions, including the Mars Pathfinder, Mars Exploration Rovers, and Mars Science Laboratory (MSL). [3] [4] She is the deputy project scientist for the MSL Curiosity rover mission.
Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is a federally funded research and development center in the City of La Cañada Flintridge, California, United States. Founded in 1936 by Caltech researchers, the laboratory is now owned and sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and administrated and managed by the California Institute of Technology.
2001 Mars Odyssey is a robotic spacecraft orbiting the planet Mars. The project was developed by NASA, and contracted out to Lockheed Martin, with an expected cost for the entire mission of US$297 million. Its mission is to use spectrometers and a thermal imager to detect evidence of past or present water and ice, as well as study the planet's geology and radiation environment. It is hoped that the data Odyssey obtains will help answer the question of whether life existed on Mars and create a risk-assessment of the radiation that future astronauts on Mars might experience. It also acts as a relay for communications between the Curiosity rover, and previously the Mars Exploration Rovers and Phoenix lander, to Earth. The mission was named as a tribute to Arthur C. Clarke, evoking the name of his and Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
A Mars rover is a motor vehicle designed to travel on the surface of Mars. Rovers have several advantages over stationary landers: they examine more territory, they can be directed to interesting features, they can place themselves in sunny positions to weather winter months, and they can advance the knowledge of how to perform very remote robotic vehicle control. They serve a different purpose than orbital spacecraft like Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. A more recent development is the Mars helicopter.
Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) is a robotic space probe mission to Mars launched by NASA on November 26, 2011, which successfully landed Curiosity, a Mars rover, in Gale Crater on August 6, 2012. The overall objectives include investigating Mars' habitability, studying its climate and geology, and collecting data for a human mission to Mars. The rover carries a variety of scientific instruments designed by an international team.
The Astrobiology Field Laboratory (AFL) was a proposed NASA rover that would have conducted a search for life on Mars. This proposed mission, which was not funded, would have landed a rover on Mars in 2016 and explore a site for habitat. Examples of such sites are an active or extinct hydrothermal deposit, a dry lake or a specific polar site.
The rocker-bogie system is the suspension arrangement developed in 1988 for use in NASA's Mars rover Sojourner, and which has since become NASA's favored design for rovers. It has been used in the 2003 Mars Exploration Rover mission robots Spirit and Opportunity, on the 2012 Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission's rover Curiosity, and the Mars 2020 rover Perseverance.
Juan R. Cruz, Ph.D., is a Puerto Rican aerospace engineer who played an instrumental role in the design and development of the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) and Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) parachute.
The Mars Astrobiology Explorer-Cacher (MAX-C), also known as Mars 2018 mission was a NASA concept for a Mars rover mission, proposed to be launched in 2018 together with the European ExoMars rover. The MAX-C rover concept was cancelled in April 2011 due to budget cuts.
Curiosity is a car-sized Mars rover designed to explore the Gale crater on Mars as part of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission. Curiosity was launched from Cape Canaveral (CCAFS) on November 26, 2011, at 15:02:00 UTC and landed on Aeolis Palus inside Gale crater on Mars on August 6, 2012, 05:17:57 UTC. The Bradbury Landing site was less than 2.4 km (1.5 mi) from the center of the rover's touchdown target after a 560 million km (350 million mi) journey.
Adam Diedrich Steltzner is an American NASA engineer who works for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). He worked on several flight projects including Galileo, Cassini, Mars Pathfinder, Mars Exploration Rovers (MER). He was the lead engineer of the Mars Science Laboratory's EDL phase, and helped design, build and test the sky crane landing system.
The Mars Science Laboratory and its rover, Curiosity, were launched from Earth on November 26, 2011. As of April 2, 2023, Curiosity has been on the planet Mars for 3787 sols since landing on August 6, 2012. (See Current status.)
Mars 2020 is a Mars rover mission that includes the rover Perseverance, the small robotic helicopter Ingenuity, and associated delivery systems, as part of NASA's Mars Exploration Program. Mars 2020 was launched from Earth on an Atlas V launch vehicle at 11:50:01 UTC on 30 July 2020, and confirmation of touch down in the Martian crater Jezero was received at 20:55 UTC on 18 February 2021. On 5 March 2021, NASA named the landing site of the rover Octavia E. Butler Landing. As of 4 April 2023, Perseverance and Ingenuity have been on Mars for 754 sols.
Planetary Instrument for X-Ray Lithochemistry (PIXL) is an X-ray fluorescence spectrometer to determine the fine scale elemental composition of Martian surface materials designed for the Perseverance rover as part of the Mars 2020 mission.
Alejandro Miguel San Martín is an Argentine engineer of NASA and a science educator. He is best known for his work as Chief Engineer for the Guidance, Navigation, and Control system in the latest missions to Mars. His best known contribution is the Sky Crane system, of which he is coinventor, used in the Curiosity mission for the descent of the rover.
Sarah Milkovich is lead of Science Operations for the Mars 2020 rover at Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She was investigation scientist for the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Dawn Yvonne Sumner is an American geologist, planetary scientist, and astrobiologist. She is a professor at the University of California, Davis. Sumner's research includes evaluating microbial communities in Antarctic lakes, exploration of Mars via the Curiosity rover, and characterization of microbial communities in the lab and from ancient geologic samples. She is an investigator on the NASA Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) and was Chair of the UC Davis Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences from 2014-2016. She is Fellow of the Geological Society of America.
Bethany List Ehlmann is a professor of Planetary Science at California Institute of Technology and a Research Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Vandana "Vandi" Verma is a space roboticist and chief engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, known for driving the Mars rovers, notably Curiosity and Perseverance, using software including PLEXIL programming technology that she co-wrote and developed.
David Y. Oh is an American spacecraft systems engineer and expert in electric propulsion. Oh currently works at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) as the NASA Psyche mission Project Systems Engineering Manager. Prior to his role on Psyche, he was the cross-cutting phase lead and lead flight director for the NASA Mars Science Laboratory mission and was recognized in popular media for living on Mars time with his family during the month following the landing of the Curiosity rover.