Kobie boykins biography samples

Kobie is a principal mechanical engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, where he has worked since graduating from Rensselaer.

Boykins has been intimately involved with NASA's Mars missions since he was a college student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in.

For more than 20 years, Boykins has chipped away at Mars' mysteries, working on the exploration rovers Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity.

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Q&A: NASA engineer Kobie Boykins on exploring Mars

For most of us, faraway Mars is the stuff of science fiction. But for Kobie Boykins, mechanical engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Mars is as real as Earth. He spends his days immersed in a landscape he’s never visited, as he engineers the tools that allow science on Mars to progress.

For more than 20 years, Boykins has chipped away at Mars’ mysteries, working on the utforskning rovers Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity. Each rover added to a better understanding of the engineering behind our explorations of our neighboring planet, where the average temperature is -81 degrees Fahrenheit.

Boykins will share his experiences “Exploring Mars” with a Denver audience on Thursday, Dec. 13, as DU’s Newman Center for the Performing Arts launches its inaugural National Geographic Live series. Ahead of the schema, Boykins talked with the DU Newsroom. His remarks have been condensed and edited for clarity.

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Above Image: (c) NASA JPL
Kobie Boykins
Rocketman. Space Engineer. Optimism Personified.
Kobie Boykins became an engineer because he wanted to be “that guy who figures out how to design and build things to function at their highest level.” Well, he’s succeeded. Kobie is a principal mechanical engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, where he has worked since graduating from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In more than twenty-five years at the lab, he has worked on every Mars mission since the Pathfinder mission, which took the first Rover, “Sojourner,” to Mars in 1996. Later, Kobie designed the solar arrays that powered the Mars Exploration Rovers, “Spirit” and “Opportunity.” Those Rovers landed in 2004 and were expected to perform for 90 days, but they lived for six years and fourteen years, respectively, sending images and data back to Earth and discovering that the surface of Mars once held water.
Next, Kobie led the mo
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Exploring Mars
Transcript (English)
- My fundamental job is to design and build hardware that goes out and explores our universe.
- [Christopher] Kobie Boykins is a mechanical engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
- [Kobie] I've built things that have gone to the surface of Mars, built things that look back at Earth, things that have gone under the ocean. I've built things that have gone into deep space.
- [Christopher] In 1949, the first human made object was sent into space. Since this time, computers and other tech allow us to see into the universe like never before. Advancements in technology have allowed scientists to consistently reach further into the universe. For example, by late 2018, NASA's deep space probe, Voyager 1, was nearly 13.5 billion miles away from Earth, and yet it's still sharing data with scientists. The United States has successfully landed eight advanced robots on Mars, and Kobie has contribute