Space

Bryce Strauss graduated from the Cockrell School of Engineering with his bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering in May 2015. Now, only a year later, Strauss will be on console at mission control as a mission operations systems engineer for the critical moment when NASA’s Juno spacecraft enters Jupiter’s orbit on July 4, 2016.

Behind every successful spacecraft mission is a team of experts running thousands of calculations to accurately predict what could go wrong and avoid costly mistakes. For this level of mathematical prediction, NASA is turning to Brandon Jones, an uncertainty quantification researcher and aerospace engineering professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering.

The NASA mission leader responsible for the operations of the Curiosity rover that landed on Mars in 2012, Michael Watkins, is returning to his roots at The University of Texas at Austin as the next director of the Center for Space Research (CSR) at the Cockrell School of Engineering.