Mark W. Powell

Mark W. Powell is a Senior Member of Technical Staff at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA since 2001. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering in 2000 from the University of South Florida, Tampa. His dissertation work was in the area of advanced illumination modeling, color and range image processing applied to robotics and medical imaging and received the award for Outstanding Dissertation from the University of South Florida. At JPL his area of focus is science data visualization and science planning for telerobotics. He supported the 2004 Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission operations as a Science Downlink Coordinator, facilitating the timely downlink and analysis of science data from the rovers. He received the NASA Software of the Year Award for his work on the Science Activity Planner science visualization and activity planning software used for MER operations. He also received the Imager of the Year award from Advanced Imaging Magazine for his work on Maestro, the publicly available version of the Science Activity Planner for MER. Mark has been programming in Java and loving every minute of it since it was first used in web browsers in 1995. He, his wife Nina, and daughters Gwendolyn and Jacquelyn live in Tujunga, CA.