I began with NASA long ago, a fresh new PhD from MIT studying data from the Pioneer Project. I expected to leave when this was over, but instead I remained to study data from other outer solar system missions, develop AI software for autonomous aircraft and potential Mars rovers, co-author the Viewpoints high-performance visualization package, support NASA’s Applied Information Science Research Program, and most recently, help with the commissioning phase of Kepler, NASA’s new mission to search for Earth-like planets around nearby stars. It’s been fun! And I’ve been proud to contribute to NASA’s research effort. But now it’s time to move on.
Where to next? Who can say? But I’ve left the agency to move into industry, and as I’ve promised myself for years, I commemorated this moment by heaping up a great pile of DARC-310 and FF-427 forms — the inspiration for the infamous Viking Raid Page — and setting them ablaze. Irresponsible? Perhaps. Juvenile? Almost certainly!
But it was great…
