WAS March 2025 - Sarah Elizabeth McCandless, JPL, Exploring an Icy World with Europa Clipper скачать в хорошем качестве

WAS March 2025 - Sarah Elizabeth McCandless, JPL, Exploring an Icy World with Europa Clipper

WAS Welcomes Sarah Elizabeth McCandless for the first time to our free lecture series. “There is still so much that we don’t know – and I actually think that’s kind of cool.” As NASA’s Europa Clipper Mission continues its journey to Jupiter’s icy moon, meet Sarah Elizabeth McCandless, an interplanetary navigator on the team. Learn how her love for exploration – from piloting planes to participating in a 45-day simulated Mars mission – has shaped her career at NASA. For the first time, NASA is sending a spacecraft to study a moon at Jupiter in detail. This icy moon, Europa, is one of the most promising places to look for currently habitable conditions elsewhere in our solar system. Europa Clipper launched October 14, 2024 and is currently on its journey to this icy world. Come join us and learn about the science of this fascinating mission and how engineering makes it possible. Sarah Elizabeth works for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) as a navigation engineer. She has flown eleven different missions exploring our solar system, including the Mars Perseverance rover, Artemis I, Psyche, and Europa Clipper. Working as an “interplanetary Google maps”, she ensures we know a spacecraft’s location and can precisely predict its trajectory to ensure successful orbit insertion about or landing on another planet or body. In 2024, she was selected for NASA’s Human Exploration Research Analog (HERA) Campaign 7 Mission 3 and served as an “analog astronaut”, simulating a mission to Mars for 45 days at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. McCandless earned a Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering and minor in French at the University of Kansas, and earned a Master of Science in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, focusing on orbital mechanics. Outside of work, she enjoys running, camping, piloting Cessna 172s and traveling with friends and family.