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Jennifer Rocca

Jennifer Rocca (previously Jennifer Owens) is a former COSGC student who worked on Homer (link to the original team page) and COSGC's first satellite program Citizen Explorer during her undergraduate degree.  She earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Aerospace Engineering Sciences from the University of Colorado in Boulder (1998), and a Master of Science degree in Aerospace and Astronautics at Stanford University (2000).  She is now a Systems engineer at JPL working on the Dawn Mission which is to be launched in late summer or early fall 2007.  Since starting at JPL in 2000 she has worked on JPL's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (Grace) which are twin Earth-orbiting satellites where she oversaw the integration of the JPL-built instruments.  She also was part of the 2005 Deep Impact mission, in which the spacecraft's impactor was essentially "run over" by the nucleus of comet Tempel 1.  Rocca built the mission's single largest sequence, which coordinated final approach maneuvers and imaging by both spacecraft in the final week prior to encounter (1).  She was featured in NASA's focus for the Dawn mission this year and the entire feature can be viewed here.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/dawn/news/rocca-20070405.html

Credits: 1.  JPL http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/dawn/news/rocca-20070405.html

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