GEMS: A Discovery Mission to Understand Terrestrial Planet Evolution (Bruce Banderdt)
Bruce Banerdt is a planetary geophysicist, working in the Earth and Space Sciences Division at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory since 1977. He has participated in numerous planetary flight-instrument teams, including the Mars orbiter laser altimeter on Mars Global Surveyor, the synthetic aperture radar on the Magellan mission to Venus, the seismometer on the NetLander mission to Mars (unfortunately canceled before launch), and the SESAME acoustic sounder on the European Rosetta comet mission. He helped develop a miniature micro-electro-mechanical system seismometer and has been working for the past twenty years to send seismometers to explore Mars and the moon. He is currently the principal investigator of the Geophysical Monitoring Station Discovery mission, a Mars geophysical lander that is one of three missions selected to enter a one-year Phase A competition possibly leading to a launch in 2016.
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