Professor George McDonald Joins the Curiosity Rover & Perseverance Camera Team

Professor McDonald has recently joined the Curiosity (Mars Science Laboratory) rover team, as well as the Mastcam-Z camera team on the Perseverance rover (Mars 2020). On Curiosity, McDonald will assist with operations for the meteorology instrument (Rover Environmental Monitoring Station, REMS). On Perseverance, McDonald plans imaging sequences using the Mastcam-Z instrument, while continuing his previous role in operations and analysis of that rover's meteorology instrument (the Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer, MEDA). Scientifically, McDonald is interested in understanding wind-driven sand motion and dust lifting on Mars.

Student research is an important component of McDonald's work. Two students as part of the Oregon Space Grant Consortium's OrION summer internship program, as well as another undergraduate lab member, are enabling new analyses of the Dawn spacecraft's observations of the dwarf planet Ceres through corrections to its spectrometer data.