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His Project Is A Roving Success
Talk about distributed operations! Dr. John Callas, project manager for NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Mission, supervises two robot geologists — known better as Spirit and Opportunity — working about 50 million miles away on the surface of the Red Planet, as well as a human team of 100 engineers and scientists back here on Earth.
Approaching his 20th year as a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., Dr. John Callas says the work has been a “dream job” from the very beginning. “This is fun! If you’re doing stuff that you enjoy, you’re at your best.” At the moment, the “fun stuff” is serving as project manager for NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover mission. Callas leads a team of 100 engineers and scientists managing the activities of Spirit and Opportunity, the twin rovers that landed on Mars in January 2004.
Callas has worked on the Rover mission since 2000 and five other Mars missions since joining JPL in 1987. He grew up near Boston, graduated from Tufts University, and earned his doctorate in physics from Brown University. He was named the Mars Rover project manager last year after earlier roles as science manager and deputy project manager for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. Callas spoke recently with ProjectsAtWork about managing a project that has far exceeded expectations and …
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