Join us in the WAS Classroom for this exciting talk with Erik S. Bailey, Aerospace Engineer and Veteran of Multiple US Mars Landings who will join us online. Erik will cover humanity’s landings on the surfaces of other worlds: Earth’s Moon, Venus, Mars, Titan, Comet 67-P, and Asteroids Eros, Hyabusa and Bennu. This event will be live-streamed on YouTube and as a Webinar on Zoom, but we’d love to see you in the classroom at the Westport Observatory. As always, the talk will be posted on our YouTube channel afterwards.

Erik S. Bailey holds dual degrees in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT and has spent his career at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech, where he served for nearly a decade as Technical Group Supervisor of the Entry, Descent, and Landing (EDL) Guidance and Control Systems Group.

Erik was part of the EDL teams for some of the most iconic Mars missions in history — including the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity, the Mars Phoenix Lander, and contributed to testing of the sky crane landing system used to deliver the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers to the Martian surface. He also served as the primary EDL simulation analyst for the Mars InSight Lander mission proposal.

His expertise spans aerospace modeling, simulation, and uncertainty quantification — the science of understanding and honestly reporting the limits and risks in complex engineering systems. He has also contributed to NASA programs in autonomous landing, terrain relative navigation, and supersonic deceleration technology.

Don’t miss this rare opportunity to hear firsthand from an engineer who has helped land spacecraft on Mars.

The next Cal’s Corner will feature a galaxy that may be on the bubble.