Miguel San Martin

Biography

Miguel San Martin grew up in Argentina and came to the United States after high school to pursue his dream of working for NASA.  He graduated summa cum laude from Syracuse University with a degree in Electrical Engineering, being named Engineering Student of the Year.  He received his Masters degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Aeronautics and Astronautics Engineering with a specialization in Guidance, Navigation, and Control for interplanetary space exploration.  Upon graduation, he was hired by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the NASA center that specializes in interplanetary space exploration.

Early in his career, he participated in the Magellan mission to Venus and the Cassini mission to Saturn.  He was later named Chief Engineer for the Guidance, Navigation, and Control system for the Pathfinder mission, which landed Sojourner, the first robotic vehicle to land on Mars.  He later assumed the same role for the highly successful mission that landed the robotic vehicles, Spirit and Opportunity on Mars in 2004.  Most recently, he was the Chief Engineer for Guidance, Navigation, and Control for the Mars Science Laboratory, which landed successfully the one-ton rover, Curiosity, on the surface of Mars on August 5, 2012.  He was a co-architect of Curiosity’s innovative SkyCrane landing architecture, receiving the NASA Exceptional Achievement in Engineering Medal for his contributions. He was named JPL Fellow in 2013.