Driving a Mars Rover: the Unlikely Path from Reader to NASA Roboticist

Eric Baumgartner, President - Milwaukee School of Engineering

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Unlike most engineers, growing up, Eric Baumgartner wasn't the kid building things in his garage. And yet, his love for science fiction and Carl Sagan books opened a world of possibilities beyond his small hometown, eventually leading to a fascinating career driving rovers across the surface of Mars.

Today, Dr. Eric Baumgartner is president of the Milwaukee School of Engineering. But before returning to academia, he turned that childhood fascination with space into a decade-long career at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, helping develop the robotic arms for Spirit and Opportunity and becoming one of the first engineers to drive the rovers on Mars.

In this episode, Baumgartner takes host Matt Kirchner behind the scenes of a job few people will ever have, from sending commands millions of miles away to working a schedule built around the Martian day. He shares one of his most nerve-racking days, when he promised he could place a spectrometer on a tiny Martian “blueberry” before he actually knew how to do it. His eventual decision to leave JPL and return to academia brings his story full circle and sets up Part 2 of the conversation.

Listen to learn:

  • How a future roboticist found his childhood inspiration in books
  • What it means to "drive” a rover millions of miles away on Mars
  • Why driving a Mars rover meant living and working on Martian time
  • How a Martian “blueberry” helped scientists uncover evidence of Mars’ watery past
  • Why extraordinary engineering applications still rely on foundational principles

Watch the Full Episode on YouTube

3 Big Takeaways

1. Inspiration can come from unexpected places. Baumgartner wasn’t a childhood tinkerer or builder, yet his fascination with science fiction and Carl Sagan led him toward a career in engineering at NASA. Seeing possibilities beyond his own experience gave Baumgartner a direction long before he knew how he would get there.
2. Good engineering anticipates problems before they happen. Driving Opportunity meant building command sequences on Earth before sending them to Mars, where the rover executed them autonomously. For Baumgartner, that meant thinking through what could go wrong on Mars before he would have the chance to respond from Earth.
3. The more advanced the application, the more important the fundamentals become. At JPL, Baumgartner initially saw the work as “crazy engineering,” but came to recognize that the extraordinary part was the application: putting a robotic arm on Mars and positioning a spectrometer on a target only millimeters across. Underneath those extraordinary applications were the same foundational engineering principles he had learned years earlier.

 Resources in this Episode:

Other resources mentioned:

Connect with our guest online:

Dr. Eric Baumgartner - LinkedIn  |  LinkedIn  |  Facebook  |  Vimeo |  Instagram |  X  |  YouTube

 

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