Engineers figure out how to implement cool science — things like shooting a rocket to the moon, deploying the sky crane maneuver, sending probes all over the solar system, building space telescopes and much more. On Blue Dot today, we hear from Riley Duren, principal engineer and chief systems engineer for the Earth Science Directorate at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, about some of the projects he's been a part of and the issues and challenges that arise making that stuff exist, and making it work.
We also check in with Adam Steltzner, the NASA engineer who figured out how to get the Mars Curiosity Rover safely on the surface of Mars.