Primary Advisor: John Moores
Secondary Advisor: Catherine Neish
Mr. Jacob L. Kloos finished his MSc in Dr. John E. Moores’ group and began his PhD program in September, 2016. Mr. Kloos has taken leadership of a project to quantify clouds as viewed from the Mars Science Laboratory Rover Curiosity and has recently finished a project intended to qualify his theoretical models of martian cloud based on terrestrial stratospheric cirrus, which forms under similar temperature and pressure conditions.
Mr. Kloos completed Operations Training with the Mars Science Laboratory Team and learned the science behind the instruments that make up the environmental science side of the rover. He was certified as an Environmental Science Theme Lead and Keeper of the Plan (ESTLK); and worked as a Collaborator on NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory Mission. Throughout, he took shifts in rover planning and has gained the respect of senior scientists as their representative in the process that determines what science the rover will collect on Mars each day.
It was this ability to combine science and engineering that led Mr. Kloos to discover a flaw in one of the atmospheric imaging observations and to develop a fix that improved the sensitivity of the observation by an order of magnitude. This law was a subtle effect of the way in which the camera operated and how it was commanded and would not have been realized without this kind of cross-over experience, exactly the kind of advance which TEPS seeks to cultivate.
Relevance to TEPS
This project will develop a technology (‘Instrument Development’) that has the capability to assist with robotic space exploration, therefore helping to quantify key parameters of volatile transport and storage on ‘airless’ bodies within the ‘Local Laboratory.’ This improved local knowledge will, in turn, help to refine models of exoplanetary bodies and their exospheres.
