The AIAA Student Branch at the University of Michigan will be hosting Distinguished Lecturer Todd Barber on Tuesday, March 23 at 8pm for a virtual talk on the Mars Curiosity rover, including the history, motivation, and preparation for this historic mission.Todd Barber is a JPL senior propulsion engineer, spending two decades as lead propulsion engineer on the Cassini mission to Saturn, also following part-time work on the Mars Exploration Rover (MER), Deep Impact, and Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) missions. Recently, Todd completed his work on the Dawn mission, an ion propulsion mission to the two largest main-belt asteroids, Vesta and Ceres. He also recently began supporting the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission and was the Mars 2020 propulsion lead engineer for operations. Much to Todd's delight, he is now supporting the Voyager mission as well, more than forty years after launch.
Todd received NASA's Exceptional Achievement Award in 1996 for his work on Galileo. In 2018, Mr. Barber was also honored to receive NASA's Exceptional Public Service Medal for heading up Cassini's propulsion team for nearly two decades. Mr. Barber is a native of Wichita, Kansas, and attended MIT between 1984 and 1990, obtaining B.S. and M.S. degrees in aerospace engineering, with a humanities concentration in music. He is also a composer of church choral music, with two pieces published to date. His hobbies include singing charitably and professionally, playing the piano, snagging degree confluences (exact integer latitude/longitude intersections), visiting all the U.S. tri-state corners and national parks, playing basketball (though it's been a while), and amateur astronomy.
His talk on the 23rd will focus primarily on the Mars rover Curiosity, which landed on the red planet on August 5, 2012. Topics to be discussed include the history of Mars rovers at JPL, the scientific motivation for Curiosity, and the preparations for launch for the historic mission.
When: Tuesday, March 23 at 8pm
Where: Zoom!
Sign-up and Zoom link:
https://tinyurl.com/BarberDL------------------------------
Jimmy Stieber
Chair | U of M AIAA Student Branch
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