One two three,
I'm Mark Raymond.
I'm the JPL chief engineer for Mission operations and
science.
I'm responsible for all the missions that are in
space.
I started watching Star Trek when my older brother
watched it when it was on in reruns
and I immediately fell in love with it became
an incredible Star Trek fan.
I do not totally understand the emotion even when
I was in high school.
I want to start wrecked.
Trivia contest sponsored by star the Star Trek Association
for Revival.
I have a PhD in physics.
I'm pretty nerdy the first class I ever skipped
was in graduate school.
When a Star Trek movie open and I thought
which do I want to do see the opening
of a new Star Trek movie
or go to a Friday afternoon class and statistical
mechanics and thermodynamics.
It was a pretty easy call.
I went to the Star Trek movie
make it so one of the missions I was
lucky enough to work out at JPL is called
Deep Space 1
And I was in charge of this Mission.
It was the first spacecraft to use ion propulsion
for interplanetary travel
and I first heard of ion propulsion in the
episode Spock's brain.
And if you really know your trivia,
it also showed up in the Menagerie.
This was also the first spacecraft from the United
States
to take a camera
to a comet and we got close up pictures
of the nucleus of a comet,
but to me, it was so cool
to work on something
that used
ion propulsion.
It never occurred to me.
I'd grow up if I ever really did grow
up
and get to work on a real Mission
you
An ion propulsion.
So cool
liftoff of the Delta II rocket with Dawn using
ion propulsion to reach the Catalyst sub our solar
system another mission that I've been lucky enough to
be responsible for here at JPL is NASA's Dawn
Mission the only spacecraft ever to orbit to extraterrestrial
destinations.
In fact, there's a model of it right there
and it uses ion propulsion to in fact, it
has 3 ion engines.
So for those of Of you who know about
Star Wars TIE fighter with twin ion engines.
My spacecraft Dawn does the Star Wars Tie fighters
one better.
I've been an incredible Star Trek fan my whole
life
and even now getting to work at JPL
really just a big kid here.
I still love Star Trek and I often think
about
how lucky I am
to really
conduct deep space missions
interplanetary Adventures
exploring alien worlds
and in
Going Beyond on there
is a picture of Vesta
the second largest world between Mars and Jupiter
and my spacecraft was responsible for exploring this alien
world.
I feel like I'm living Star Trek.