Ms. Kendra Short is the manager of the Mechanical Systems Division at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She has been at JPL for over 20 years starting as a mechanical hardware engineer and has worked on the Cassini, Mars Pathfinder, and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) programs. More recently she has held several organizational and project management roles. She earned a BS in Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University in 1989 and an MS in Aero/Astro from Stanford University in 1992.

Kendra will discuss the Mars Science Laboratory mission, which is NASA’s next generation rover to explore the surface of Mars and is scheduled for launch in 2011. The vehicle design is driven by an entwined combination of geometry constraints, complex and varied loading events and environmental extremes. Her talk will address many of the challenges and their solutions through the application of analysis and simulation software.

We hope you will be able to attend the conference to see this and other great presentations. Online conference registration is available at http://event.plmworld.org/.