Alejandro Soto
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Flight Project Experience
In four years working at JPL I experienced the entire flight project development cycle, from preliminary design to launch.
Working at JPL in the Observational Systems Division provided me an array of experiences as an engineer in space exploration. I worked on advanced concept design, technology development, instrument design, science operations, and instrument/payload system engineering. I worked as a junior member on large teams as well as led teams of engineers. My projects included missions that flew and succeeded to those that were canceled to those that are still being developed or proposed. This list of missions includes: Pluto Kuiper Express, Europa Orbiter, Solar Probe, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Deep Impact, MARVEL (a Mars Scout proposal), and the Terrestrial Planet Finder Coronagraph.
The majority of my time was spent working as a payload system engineer on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a science operations engineer on Deep Impact, and the instrument engineer for the occultation spectrometer on the MARVEL Scout proposal.
Deep Impact: The Mission
"Your First Look Inside a Comet!" -- tagline from the Deep Impact website.
NASA's Deep Impact mission was a novel planetary mission to answer important questions about the formation of the solar system and the formation of comets. Comprised of a flyby spacecraft and an impactor spacecraft, Deep Impact flew to the comet Tempel-1 where the impactor collided with the comet. In doing so, this collision provided a wealth of new data about comets.
Deep Impact answers two questions that relate to understanding the formation of our solar system:
- What's the difference in composition between inside and outside the comet?
- How is the comet put together?
More details on the mission plan can be found at the Deep Impact website.
The impactor on Deep Impact slams into the Tempel-1 comet while the Deep Impact flyby spacecraft takes pictures and spectra. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UMD.
Deep Impact: My involvment
I worked as a Science Operations Engineer on the Deep Impact mission until launch of the spacecraft.
While working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, I was offered a job on Deep Impact working as a science operations engineer, a job I gladly accepted. Working with one of the Deep Impact co-Investigators, Ken Klaasen, I was responsible for developing the lunar calibration observations as well as the training for science operations during flight. Being the engineering experience, I was immersed in the science of the mission, since my job involved regular interactions with the science team.
Four days after launch, Deep Impact captures an image of the moon with its Medium Resolution Instrument (MRI). Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UMD.
Mars Reconnaissance: The Mission
"An Unprecedented Look at Mars" -- from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) website.