Month: May 2020

I am happy to announce that we have filled the critical senior manager role in the Science Mission Directorate (SMD) of Mars Sample Return (MSR) program director. Jeff Gramling will be joining us June 22 to begin that important work.

The Mars Sample Return campaign, which begins its first leg with the launch of Mars 2020 Perseverance this summer, is a complex international partnership between NASA and ESA, with multiple launches to Mars planned in 2026 and high visibility around the world. It’s going to do something that has never been done before, which is to bring samples from the Martian surface back to Earth for further study. We will be able to do so much more with these samples in state-of-the-art laboratories on Earth, and we’re very excited about it. Jeff brings a lot of experience to the position.

Jeff comes to us from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, where he is a program manager and has worked on the Galactic/Extragalactic Ultra long duration balloon Spectroscopic Terahertz Observatory (GUSTO) and also served as a member of the Standing Review Board for the Mars 2020 Perseverance mission. Throughout his career, in his project and program management positions on NASA projects in the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate (HEOMD) and SMD, he has worked on directed, decadal, and Announcement of Opportunity (AO) missions.

Some of you may remember him from his long tenure at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, where he served as  Earth Systematic Missions Program Manager and Associate Director of Flight Projects for Earth Science Projects. In that role, he was responsible for directed Earth science development flight projects at Goddard, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and Langley, including Landsat-9, PACE, TSIS-1, IceSat-2, GRACE-Follow On, Sentinel-6, SWOT, NISAR, SAGE-III, and CLARREO Pathfinder. He was also responsible for enhancements to the Earth Science Data Information System (ESDIS) and led efforts to establish acquisition strategies and develop project plans for missions in formulation. On his watch, Jason-3, SAGE-III, and TSIS-1 launched successfully.

He began at Goddard in 1985 supporting the Hubble Space Telescope project through launch. In 1992, he began his long association with the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) project. After supporting the launches of TDRS-F and G on the space shuttle in the 1990s as a subsystem manager, he became spacecraft bus manager and then space segment manager on the second-generation development program for TDRS H, I, and J, launched between 2000 and 2002. In 2006, he became acting TDRS project manager and began leading that team on the formulation of the third generation TDRS satellites (TDRS-K, L M). He was named project manager in June, 2007, and led the project team through the design, build, and successful launches of TDRS K in 2013 and TDRS L in 2014. Following completion of the TDRS-M spacecraft in 2015, he served as acting deputy program manager for Earth Systematic Missions until his appointment to the Senior Executive Service.

The Mars Sample Return program director will report directly to me, but the MSR program will be tightly coupled with our existing Mars Exploration Program. The Planetary Science Division (PSD) will ensure coordination as PSD remains focused on the rest of our large Martian fleet.

We will transition NASA HQ campaign leadership from Jim Watzin to Jeff. I would like to thank Jim for his excellent leadership during the early formulation phase to enable the NASA and ESA team to develop the Mars Sample Return approach we are now implementing.

Please join me in welcoming Jeff to Headquarters. We’ll give you a chance to meet him as soon as we can.

It was my great pleasure today to welcome to NASA’s Science Mission Directorate our new Earth Science Division director, Dr. Karen St. Germain. She will join our team June 8. Her enthusiasm and the experience she has gained throughout her distinguished career will bring great value and perspective to our critical work to learn more about our home planet, to apply our capabilities to improve products and services to all the worlds’ citizens, and to help lead the implementation of the future Earth Science mission portfolio integrated with missions from our commercial, interagency, and international partners.

I want to thank Sandra Cauffman for her leadership during the leadership transition period which lasted some sixteen months. She took on a challenging role and successfully kept our Earth Science work on track — cultivating our international partnerships, stewarding new and existing missions, and raising the profile of this important work. She has my deepest gratitude. Dr. Paula Bontempi served as deputy director (acting) and similarly made important contributions. Gratitude also goes to her. Finally, I also want to thank everyone who took the time to apply for this position and for the many thoughtful interviews we had during the process. We have a great pool of talent in this community, and it was a testament to ESD that there was so much interest in this position.  I look forward to building on that interest with Dr. St. Germain in the coming months.

Dr. St. Germain is no stranger to space and holds a senior position at one of NASA’s biggest partners on orbit, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She is currently the deputy assistant administrator, systems, for NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDID). In that role, she guides the ongoing development and deployment of NOAA’s two major satellite programs – the Joint Polar Satellite System and the Geostationary Operational Environment Satellite – R series, as well as the COSMIC-2 mission and Space Weather Follow-On.

She also leads the development of the next generation capabilities to replenish and augment these systems in the future. Prior to becoming deputy associate administrator, she served as the director of the Office of Systems Architecture and Advanced Planning, where she led enterprise-level mission architecture development and systems engineering to enable NESDIS to become a flexible, stable and responsive civil space agency in support of NOAA’s mission. Dr. St. Germain is an expert in major systems acquisition, with particular proficiency in transitioning new technology into operational systems and was NOAA’s lead for all aspects of performance during the development of the joint NASA-NOAA-DOD Suomi-NPP system from 2006 to 2011.

In 2011, Dr. St. Germain began work in the Space, Strategic and Intelligence Systems Office (SSI), Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics. At SSI, she led the Department of Defense’s 2014 Strategic Portfolio Review for Space and helped develop a strategy and implementation plan for adapting to evolving challenges in the space domain. She also led the Remote Sensing and Prompt Strike Division within SSI, where she was responsible for shaping acquisition and oversight of DoD’s strategic missile warning and space-based environmental monitoring portfolio and was also program director of the Conventional Prompt Global Strike Program.

Dr. St. Germain has had a successful research career at the University of Massachusetts, the University of Nebraska, and the Naval Research Laboratory. She has performed research aboard ice-breakers in the Arctic and Antarctic, flown through hurricanes and tropical storms on NOAA’s P-3 airplanes and measured glacial ice on a snowmobile traverse of the Greenland ice sheet. She also led the modeling and calibration of the WindSat Coriolis mission, launched in 2003 as the first spaceborne radiometer to measure ocean surface wind direction.

Dr. St. Germain holds a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from Union College (1987) and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts (1993). She is also a Distinguished Graduate of the National War College, National Defense University where she earned a Master of Science degree in National Security Strategy in 2013.

We look forward to Dr. St. Germain’s leadership of Earth Science, a critical part of NASA’s portfolio that today is more important than ever.