beamjockey | Steve Collins on Flying Curiosity to Mars

Last August, Steve Collins of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory was involved in conveying the Curiosity rover to a landing on Mars.

Last October, Steve came to Chicagoland at the invitation of a local engineering group and gave a talk-- which has recently been posted to Youtube.

It runs one hour and 40 minutes. Steve, as you may know, is an excellent speaker. For Curiosity-- formally the Mars Science Laboratory project-- he served as Cruise Attitude Control System Engineer.

The Fox Valley chapter of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers organized the October event. OSMOCES, "Open Source Mechatronics Outreach & Creative Exchange Symposium," brought together high school students, engineers, scientists, and techie hobbyists for conversation, demos, and hands-on workshops.

In addition to Steve's keynote speech, there were Raspberry Pi demos, student robotics teams, 3-D printers, members of local hacker spaces, Kickstarter mavens, and several denizens of the General Technics mailing list.

I believe the video was posted by "Attentiondotnet" of the local Workshop88 hacker space.

If you're curious about Mars, catch the video.

If you know young people near Chicago with an interest in "makers," robotics, open source, etc., encourage them to come to OSMOCES in 2013.

If you'd like to help with the event, let me know and I'll put you in touch with the organizers.

From C-SPAN, 2005: Steve tells a story about the Mars Exploration Rovers.

What I wrote about Steve, for an audience of science fiction fans, in 1999.