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DAVID WILSON - COMMANDER
David is from Tasmania Australia and is a mechanical engineer with some 16 years experience in the Australian mining and materials handling industry but currently works at NASA Ames on Spacesuit operation, new organics extraction technology, and earlier in 2012, payload integration concepts for the “Red Dragon on Mars project. He was at MDRS in 2011 on the DOMMEX team undertaking drilling trials. He is currently completing a master in astronomy, is a director of the Mars Society Australia and has co-authored and published space related papers and undertaken field expeditions with planetary scientists to the Australian Flinders Rangers in 2005 and 2009, the Californian Mojave desert in 2010, the MDRS in 2011 and the Pilbara, Western Australia in 2011.
At MDRS, David will be collecting samples for future testing in the organics extractor and trialling a semi-autonomous UAV helicopter mapping technology.
HARITINA MOGOSANU - CREW DIRCTOR
Haritina is a horticultural engineer and holds a masters degree in environmental management. Her other expertise includes biosecurity; information management, astronomy, communication, public speaking and management. She is also an enthusiastic StarryTeller and has a strong interest in cultu
ral relations and international security.
Her goal is to promote scientific education using space sciences.
To inspire people to use curiosity driven exploration. To encourage them to discover who they are and to follow their dreams. To share her belief that culture is merely a set of instructions handed down from our ancestors to ensure our best survival. That culture is shaped merely by geographical constraints, not worth going to war over it but worth understanding how it can make us stronger in a global society.
To know that extinct is forever and progress can only be achieved if we share knowledge and work together, with clear goals.
More than anything her wish is that people realise that we are really made of stardust.
MELANIE NEWFIELD - CREW JOURNALIST
Melanie currently manages the Plants and Pathways Risk Assessment team at the Ministry for Primary Industries. Her main work in riskassessment has been assessing non-native species risks for plants and moths, and the risks associated with non-biological cargo such as shippingcontainers. She co-authored a risk analysis for Antarctica New Zealand's operations in the Ross Sea Region of Antarctica.She has worked in a diverse range of environments, from the New Zealand back country, Niue, Mauritian offshore islands and Ross Island inAntarctica. She has experience in hygiene protocols for offshore islands and protected areas, invasive plant management, eradication and monitoring, teaching botany to senior managers and goat hunters, and working with a wide range of people from diverse backgrounds. Outside work, her skills include growing her own food, cooking from scratch (e.g.making bread by hand), waste mimisation and belly dancing.
EMMA BRAEGEN - CREW ENGINEER & HEALTH/SAFETY OFFICER
Emma Braegen is a mechanical engineering working at BAE Systems Australia. She studied a double degree in mechanical engineering and science at the University of Adelaide. Her honours project was working on design and build of a cubesat satellite. She was one of the students in the first Southern Hemisphere Summer Space Program held in Adelaide in 2011 at the University of South Australia.
JEN BLANK - CREW XO (EXECUTIVE OFFICER)
At NASA Ames Research Center, I work in the field of Astrobiology. Astrobiology encompasses just about any subject you can imagine, but all of us who claim the title of Astrobiologist share an interest in the origin and evolution of life or life's building blocks and the conditions that once supported life or may support life in the universe. I study a Mars analog site in California a few hours away, focusing on the microbial ecology and carbonate minerals formed in spring waters; these minerals appear to be formed through biological activity and, as such, provide a record of life in the rocks long after they are gone. I also model chemical reactions that occur under the extreme conditions of cometary collisions with Earth; this shock of impact generates organic compounds that may have contributed to the origin of life. Finally, I'm a member of the Mars Science Laboratory science team, a group of over 400 scientists who are currently using the Curiosity rover to explore Gale Crater on Mars. Our goal as a team is to characterize the martian environment and look for evidence that Mars once was habitable to life. Within MSL, I'm affiliated with the ChemCam instrument that can probe the chemistry of materials up to 7m away from the rover by zapping them with a laser and collecting the light that's emitted from the target plasma. We're looking at the mineralogy of Gale and the textural features that indicate the presence of water in the past.
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