NASA: Travel to Mars and Mission Simulations Experience

Andrzej Stewart is an experienced spacecraft operator for a wide variety of NASA missions. He’s worked as a spacecraft mission controller for NASA’s Mars orbiter fleet, Juno, GRAIL, and the Spitzer Space Telescope. Andrzej now works in Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center, developing tracking and navigation operations for upcoming missions of the Orion spacecraft. He is also a 1st Lieutenant in the Civil Air Patrol, serving as an Assistant Aerospace Education Officer and Assistant Public Affairs Officer, and currently training as a SAR/DR Mission Pilot.

Andrzej earned degrees in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and aspires to be a NASA astronaut. In pursuing that, he has served as the Flight Engineer of HERA C2M2, a two-week asteroid mission simulation at the Johnson Space Center, and as Chief Engineering Officer of HI-SEAS IV, a year-long Mars simulation in Hawaiʻi.

Andrzej will speak about the challenges of travel to Mars and his experiences in the mission simulations at JSC and Hawai'i.