Peter C. Theisinger (born 1945 in Fresno, California) is the director of the Engineering and Science Directorate at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in

Pasadena, California Pasadena ( ) is a city in Los Angeles County, California, northeast of downtown Los Angeles. It is the most populous city and the primary cultural center of the San Gabriel Valley. Old Pasadena is the city's original commercial district. I ...

and was the project manager of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Mission and later project manager for the 2011 Mars Science Laboratory mission. Theisinger graduated from the California Institute of Technology in 1967 with a bachelor's degree in physics. He joined NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) as payload integration engineer that year and except for a three-year span in the early 1980s has worked at JPL since. Among the missions on which he has participated were the 1967 Mariner 5 flyby mission to Venus, the 1971

Mariner 9 Mariner 9 (Mariner Mars '71 / Mariner-I) was a robotic spacecraft that contributed greatly to the exploration of Mars and was part of the NASA Mariner program. Mariner 9 was launched toward Mars on May 30, 1971 from LC-36B at Cape Canaveral Air ...

orbiter mission to Mars, the

Voyager Voyager may refer to: Computing and communications * LG Voyager, a mobile phone model manufactured by LG Electronics * NCR Voyager, a computer platform produced by NCR Corporation * Voyager (computer worm), a computer worm affecting Oracle ...

mission to the outer planets of the Solar System, the ''

Galileo Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de' Galilei (15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642) was an Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer, sometimes described as a polymath. Commonly referred to as Galileo, his name was pronounced (, ). He was ...

'' mission to Jupiter, and the Mars Global Surveyor orbiter. In 2013, Theisinger, along with Richard Cook, was named one of ''Time'' magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the World as a pioneer for his role in getting the ''Curiosity'' rover to Mars safely in August 2012.

References

External links

NASA Biography

JPL Biography
{{DEFAULTSORT:Theisinger, Pete NASA people Mars Exploration Rover mission California Institute of Technology alumni 1945 births Living people