Rob Manning

In February 2011, Academy of Program/Project and Engineering Leadership Director Ed Hoffman sat down with Rudi Schmidt, from the European Space Agency (ESA), and NASA’s Rob Manning at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) as part of the Academy’s Masters with Masters series.

By Rob Manning On July 4, 1997, half an hour before Pathfinder was scheduled to enter the Martian atmosphere, we had just finished the transition from Earth control to fully autonomous control: the spacecraft was now responsible for its own actions.