October 3rd Geosciences Lecture Series Talk

Event Type: 
Geosciences Lecture Series
Date: 
Friday, October 3, 2014 - 3:30pm
Earth and Space Sciences Division Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena
Location: 
3:30 PM in the UMass Campus Center — 11th floor, Marriott Room

Matt will be giving a talk about his experiences with the NASA Mars Rover Program. The talk title is How to Select a Landing Site on Mars. Dr. Matt Golombek is a Senior Research Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, the lead NASA center for planetary exploration and a veteran of space missions to Mars. Over the past 20 years, Dr. Golombek has led or been heavily involved in the selection of every successful Mars landing site in the modern era and is the JPL Mars Exploration Program Landing Site Scientist. He is currently the Project Scientist of NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover mission and is a science operations team chair for the Opportunity rover now exploring the Red Planet. Dr. Golombek is leading the landing site selection efforts for the InSight geophysical lander scheduled to launch in 2016 and the Mars 2020 Rover scheduled to collect a cache of samples for eventual return to Earth. Dr. Golombek’s research focuses on Mars geology in general and the prediction of surface characteristics at a lander scale from orbital remotely sensed data. Dr. Golombek has published over 150 papers in Scientific Journals and 470 abstracts. He was the chief scientist for the Mars Pathfinder Mission, which successfully landed a spacecraft and the Sojourner rover on Mars on July 4, 1997.