Exploring Mars
presented by taste of science festival 2021!
In February of this year, 3 new missions arrived at Mars, but they are just the latest in a long history of rovers and orbiters exploring the red planet.
Join us for an event with two speakers who have been directly involved in several of these missions. We’ll hear about the new science we are learning from these missions, as well as what it takes to design and build the instruments that make these discoveries possible.
Cynthia Gundersen
(she/her/hers)
Scientific Instrument Design and Development for Interplanetary Missions
Cynthia Gundersen is the owner and president of AMU Engineering, Inc. She has a Mechanical Engineering degree from University of Maryland and a MS degree in Mechanical Engineering, with an emphasis in Space Systems, from George Washington University.
Ms. Gundersen was a NASA employee for 11 years, prior to moving to Miami, Florida in 2001. While at NASA, she was a member of the CASSINI Huygens Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer and Ion Neutral Mass Spectrometer teams, Nozomi (Planet-B) Neutral Mass Spectrometer team, and worked on the CoNTour Neutral Mass Spectrometer as the lead mechanical engineer. As owner of AMU Engineering she has provided extensive design and development support to NASA Goddard Space Flight Center - working on mass spectrometer designs for five spaceflight missions. These missions include the Mars Science Lab on the Curiousity rover, the LADEE mission to the Moon, the MAVEN mission to Mars and the ExoMars rover mission to be launched in 2022.
She is currently supporting the design and development of the Dragonfly Ion Trap Mass Spectrometer, heading to Titan in 2027. She continues to reside in Miami with her husband, Dr. Joshua Gundersen and two sons, Jakob and Lukas.
Dr. Bruce Jakosky
(he/him/his)
Mars Exploration -- 2021 and Beyond
Dr. Jakosky is a Professor in the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics and the Dept. of Geological Sciences at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and is Associate Director for Science at LASP. He received his Ph.D. in Planetary Science and Geophysics from Caltech in 1982.
His research interests are in the geology of planetary surfaces, the evolution of the Martian atmosphere and climate, the potential for life on Mars and elsewhere, and the philosophical and societal issues in astrobiology. He headed the University of Colorado’s team in the NASA Astrobiology Institute for more than ten years. He is the Principal Investigator of the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission to Mars that has been orbiting Mars since fall of 2014.
He has published more than 200 papers in the refereed scientific literature, and has authored or co-authored a number of books, including “The Search for Life on Other Planets” and “Science, Society, and the Search for Life in the Universe”.