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Elsa Jensen
Instrument Operations Manager at MSSS and Mastcam-Z Uplink Operations Lead, Malin Space Science Systems
Shortly thereafter, Elsa joined SeaSpace Corporation in San Diego working on Earth remote sensing satellite data receiving systems where she worked in customer support and later as an applications engineer and trainer. During this time she especially enjoyed traveling to customer sites in the US as well as in Europe and Asia to train university researchers, super yacht owners and commercial customers on how to get the data they needed from weather satellites and how to process those data to pursue their environmental research, obtain early bad weather warnings, and catch more fish.
In 1998, Elsa joined Malin Space Science Systems (MSSS) and since then has served as the MSSS Instrument Operations Manager for all of the cameras from MSSS that have been sent to Mars and Jupiter since 1998.
Elsa’s Education and Public Outreach activities and interests range widely. It includes sharing her enthusiasm for Space Exploration with school children from pre-school through high school, to general public events such as JPL Open House and the Science & Technology Expo in San Diego. In addition, she has enjoyed teaching Science Olympiad to middle schoolers, co-coaching a FIRST Lego League team, giving the occasional invited talk at colleges, and guest blogging for the Planetary Society.
Latest Articles
Right after the last Mastcam-Z team meeting a year ago (link here to last two blog posts), our team finalized the design of the cameras, and then the fantastic voyage of creating Martian panoramic zoom cameras began.
It takes years to decide where a Mars rover is going to land. Members of NASA's Mars 2020's camera team describe their participation in the process.
It takes hundreds of scientists and engineers many years to design and build just one instrument for a Mars mission. In the first Mastcam-Z team blog post, we'll talk about the special challenges we expect for Mars 2020 operations, and how we're planning to overcome them.
Latest Planetary Radio Appearances
Mat Kaplan attended a meeting of the science team for the zoom lens camera that will be atop the Mars 2020 rover mast. Planetary Scientist Jim Bell tells us how this new system will show us the Red Planet as we’ve never seen it before.
Return with us to the evening of July 4, 2016 and the exciting arrival at Jupiter of the Juno orbiter. You’ll hear the moment of successful orbital insertion. Several of the mission’s key contributors reveal how Juno accomplished this feat, along with what they hope the spacecraft will tell us about the giant planet.