A Teenage Mars Rover – 14+ Years on the Surface of Mars

A Teenage Mars Rover – 14+ Years on the Surface of Mars
Oct 17, 2018 11:55 PM
Keri Bean, NASA Science Planner
A Teenage Mars Rover – 14+ Years on the Surface of Mars

If you're like me and everything sounds interesting, then go and do those things. Take classes outside of your major, go on field expeditions, etc. That's how you'll learn more about what you like and what you don't like.

- Keri Bean

Keri Bean is a mission operations engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. She currently works on two NASA missions. On the Dawn mission at the dwarf planet Ceres, she is a science planning and sequencing engineer. On the solar-powered, teenage Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, among many of her roles she is the senior Tactical Uplink Lead and is also in training to become a Rover Planner, the coveted position of Mars rover driver and robotic arm operator.

She got her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Texas A&M University in meteorology, with her focus on studying the weather on Mars. While in school, she worked on the Mars rovers Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity, along with the Phoenix Mars Lander and Hubble Space Telescope missions.

You can find her on Twitter as @PlanetaryKeri.