EECS Department Colloquium Series
Information Technology Enablers for Deep Space Exploration 
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Wednesday, November 5, 2014 Larry Bergman |
ABSTRACT:
Technology innovation has always been the engine that has enabled new space mission capabilities. For interplanetary space exploration, nowhere has this been more evident in recent years than in the field of information technology that itself spans a huge breath of underlying sub-disciplines, such as flight computing, reliable software engineering, autonomous systems, robotic vision, and advanced networking for disruption tolerant communications, to name a few. This talk will highlight a few recent space mission successes, such as in the robotic exploration of Mars, and the underlying information systems technologies that made them possible. The talk will conclude with an eye to the future, including some possible future mission directions and space technology research challenges that lie ahead, and where academia can play a role.
BIOGRAPHY:
Larry Bergman is the Manager of the Autonomous Systems and FlightComputing Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Over his 40 year career in NASA, he has held a variety of roles in mission engineering, research, and management, in such areas as fiber optics, photonic systems, flight computing, computer and satellite networks, and supercomputers. He contributed to a number of flight missions including Viking, Galileo, and Voyager, which just recently left our solar system for interstellar space, and whose flight computer is still operational after 36 years. He is a Senior Member of IEEE, has over 100 technical publications and six patents, and is the co-General Chair of the IEEE International Conference series on Space Mission Challenges for Information Technology (SMC-IT). He holds a B.S. from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, a M.S. from California Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D. from Chalmers University of Technology, all in electrical engineering.
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