University of Idaho College of Engineering alumnus Matt Braley is the data collection instrumentation engineer for the Mars Rover, Curiosity. Concluding its 352 million mile journey, Curiosity is scheduled to land on Mars Sunday, Aug. 5. Much of the instrumentation for data collection system on the Curiosity spacecraft was designed and built by NASA Engineer Braley.
Braley hails from southern California near the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. As a teenager, he dreamed of working at NASA, putting something into orbit. He served for eight years in the US Air Force as a technician servicing high performance jet fighters before coming to the University of Idaho to earn a bachelor’s of science degree in Electrical Engineering (2005).
Braley was a University of Idaho student employee of the year runner-up in 2004 and 2005 – and earned an Alumni Award for Excellence in 2005. He earned an internship at NASA in California for the summer of 2004, and in 2005, won a full three-year all expenses paid NASA fellowship to graduate school at U-Idaho. In spring 2005, just a few days before his graduation, NASA recruiters visited him on the Moscow campus and convinced him to come to work at the JPL.
Electrical Engineering Professor Herb Hess has worked with NASA on electrical engineering research projects that have included electric power generation on silicon chips and lithium microbatteries. Hess served as Braley’s faculty adviser while he was a student at the University of Idaho. The University’s EPSCoR office, at the direction of then VP for Research, Charles Hatch, arranged for Hess to work with Braley on the professor’s NASA projects. Through that partnership, NASA sent electronics that Braley designed into orbit while he was still a student at the University of Idaho.
“Matt is a genius with computerized instrumentation data collection,” said Hess. “NASA recruited him immediately upon graduation to address a big challenge. They assured him that he would have something in orbit within two years and assigned him to the Mars Rover. When I visited him a couple years later, he showed me the entire instrument data collection system he had assembled, working in his lab. On Aug. 5, his work will be on the surface of Mars. In terms of student success stories, they just don’t get any better than that.”
