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Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, February 11, 2008 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

picture of Phoenix landing on Mars

Barry Goldstein

"The Mars Exploration Program Phoenix Mission"

ABSTRACT -- The Phoenix mission is the first chosen for NASA's Scout program, an initiative for smaller, lower-cost, competed spacecraft. Named for the resilient mythological bird, Phoenix uses a lander that was intended for use by 2001's Mars Surveyor lander prior to its cancellation. It also carries a complex suite of instruments that are improved variations of those that flew on the lost Mars Polar Lander. The mission is intended to achieve the Mars Exploration Program’s long term goals of 1) determining whether life ever arose on Mars, 2) characterizing the climate on Mars, 3) characterizing the geology on Mars, and 4) preparing for human exploration. Launched on August 4th, the lander is scheduled to touch down May 25, 2008. This talk will give an overview of the mission and discuss its design, testing, and technical challenges.

SPEAKER -- Barry Goldstein is the Project Manager for Phoenix. Barry graduated from the University of Colorado in 1981, with a degree in Mathematics and a minor in Physics. He also has received and Executive Masters of Business Administration from the Peter Drucker management center at Claremont Graduate School. Barry started his career at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1982, and has worked on various deep space projects for 22 years. He started his career as a flight designer working in the Attitude and Articulation Control subsystem for the Galileo, Jupiter orbiter spacecraft. For the past nine years, Barry has been focusing on Mars missions. He was the lead system engineer for the Mars Volatiles and Climate Surveyor payload for the Mars Polar Lander. After this devolvement, he was appointed manager for the Athena Payload, which was to be core science for a rover in 2001. Barry also led the initial Mars Scouts study team, which proposed a series of small landers to investigate multiple sites of the red planet. Prior to his assignment on Phoenix, Barry served at the Deputy Flight System Manager for the hugely successful Mars Exploration Rover project.




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