Steve Collins -- Science GoH
Steve Collins is an attitude control system engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He has been a flight team member on Mars Observer, Galileo, Deep Space One, MER, and NASA's Deep Impact mission to blow a hole in the comet Tempel 1.
Steve is responsible for keeping the spacecraft pointed in the right direction, making trajectory corrections and figuring out "what the heck just happened??" Steve tends to build his tools using C and TCL and likes crisp interfaces and simple-minded code.
Steve has degrees in Physics and Theatre Arts from UC Santa Cruz. When he's not flying spacecraft around the solar system, he can be found on the soccer field, playing Theremin in the rock band "Artichoke" or performing in one of Caltech's Shakespeare productions.
Some miscellaneous facts about Steve:
- Steve pilots spacecraft. It's the coolest job until there's a real Sulu on a real bridge.
- Steve plays a theremin in the band Artichoke.
- Steve does theatrics.
- Steve programs in Tcl/Tk.
- Steve has lots of good "No-Shit, There I was" type stories about techie topics.
- With all of space to fly around in, Steve managed to run a probe into a comet (OK, he was aiming for the comet.)
- Steve is a member of General Technics and posts frequent blurbs to the mailing list when he's doing particularly neat stuff.