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Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, November 24, 2008 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Brent Bos

"Phoenix Scouts for Mars Water"

ABSTRACT -- Built mostly from cancelled flight hardware and resurrecting many of the science goals of 1999's lost Mars Polar Lander, the Phoenix Mars lander successfully landed in the Martian arctic on May 25, 2008. The mission's primary goals are: study the history of Martian water in all its phases; determine if the Martian arctic soil could support life; and study Martian weather from a polar perspective. Phoenix is the first mission in NASA's Mars Scout program which supports low-cost Mars missions of opportunity led by a single principal investigator. The mission is led by the University of Arizona's Peter H. Smith with support from a variety of private, public and international organizations. Phoenix confirmed the presence of sub-surface water ice in the Martian polar region with observations from a variety of instrumentation quite early during the surface operations phase of its mission. A few of the more interesting water observations were unexpected and are still a lively topic of debate.

SPEAKER -- Brent Bos first became an active participant in Mars exploration in 1997 after joining the imager for Mars Pathfinder team as a graduate research assistant at the University of Arizona. During his five year tenure with this group he analyzed imagery of the Martian surface to study Mars geomorphology and mineralogy and was involved in the development, building and testing of five Mars lander cameras for three different Mars missions.

When his original Ph.D. research ended with the loss of the Mars Polar Lander mission in late 1999, the instrument that was to become the robotic arm camera (RAC) for the Phoenix Mars mission became its focus instead. And in 2001 he spent three weeks in the Canadian high arctic to participate in Mars mission simulations and field test the RAC and other spacecraft instrumentation as part of the NASA Haughton-Mars project.

After successfully defending his Ph.D. in 2002, he joined the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center as a research physicist to join the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) development effort. In August 2003 NASA headquarters selected the University of Arizona’s Phoenix Mars lander to be the first mission of the Mars Scout program and in addition to supporting JWST, Dr. Bos began participating in the tests and programmatic activities to prepare the Phoenix RAC for launch and operation on the Martian surface – ultimately culminating with his participation in Phoenix science operations during the summer of 2008.

Dr. Bos currently serves as the lead JWST integrated science instrument module optical systems engineer and principal investigator for various planetary dust characterization instrument research and development projects. He has authored or co-authored papers that have appeared in the Astrophysical Journal, the Journal of Geophysical Research-Planets, Geophysical Research Letters, Proceedings of SPIE and is credited as an inventor on 25 United States patents. He currently resides in Laurel, Maryland with his wife and three children.




Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov