Every month the Mars Exploration Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory honors employees who have made a significant contribution to the work of sending spacecraft to Mars. Listed below are this issue's "Martians of the Month".
May: Jack Morrison
Jack is the lead software development engineer on the
Mars Microrover Flight
Experiment (MFEX) project. Jack developed the software
architecture, coded much of the software, and led the testing and
debugging of the software delivered with the flight unit rover
(Sojourner). In so doing, Jack took the requirements, operational
constraints, and (at times) poorly understood hardware interfaces and
realized these in the implemented rover. As a measure of the quality
of this work, the rover has performed well during test and
integration prior to delivery to the Mars
Pathfinder flight system. It also operated very capably in the
extended evaluation of the performance of the rover system in natural
terrains.
June: Henry Awaya
Henry as a member of the outstanding Pathfinder
Thermal Control Team, has made significant contributions in the
thermal design and implementation of the Pathfinder Flight System,
including his great efforts to resolve the chamber problems related
to solar-thermal-vacuum testing.
July: Jennifer Harris
Jennifer has been instrumental in the testing of the
Pathfinder Cruise and Surface sequences on the Flight System Test
Bed, and on the spacecraft in the test facility. She spent many extra
hours, and as a result the sequence team was able to develop and
update eight specific surface sequences for Sol 1 and nine cruise
sequences. The sequences performed without major flaws during
testing.
August: Dr. Sam Thurman
The key to proving that Mars Pathfinder's entry,
descent, and landing approach will perform reliably on Mars is an
intricate Monte Carlo computer simulation that accurately models the
spacecraft and its interaction with the Martian environment. Dr. Sam
Thurman was instrumental in pulling together and leading a team of
highly skilled engineers, scientists, and analysts from no less than
four JPL divisions and other NASA centers to develop this unique
computational modeling and model verification system.
September: Steve Stolper
Steve has been a key member of the Mars Pathfinder
Flight Software team from the beginning of the project. Steve is one
of those rare individuals who are highly skilled in all aspects of
software development, from system design, coding, and testing to
spacecraft operations and problem identification and resolution. He
is a key member of the round the clock test team; testing, debugging,
and retesting of the flight software in the testbed and on the flight
spacecraft in ATLO. Steve was responsible for the development of
several critical components of the flight software: engineering
telemetry, software health verification, 1553 bus control, and device
control for all of the peripheral devices on the 1553 bus. Steve
continues to be an exceptional team member, as the development and
testing of the flight software comes to a conclusion, and he will be
a member of the flight operations team.