At the start of 2025 I was awarded an Emergent Ventures grant to carry out my Masters Thesis research at NASA JPL, on the Endurance Lunar Rover project. Endurance is a mission concept for a long range rover capable of traversing 2000km on the far side of the moon, with minimal control input from Earth.
I spent the year in Pasadena, adding the ability to autonomously manage Power and Thermal states to the rover. The resulting paper was published at AIAA SciTech in January 2026.
Working at NASA JPL was a long held dream of mine, and I was immensly grateful to be able to work on a planned mission in the “Pre-Project” phase, where research teams come together to apply their work and produce a testable working hardware prototype.
A highlight of mine was a continuous 3 day test in the California desert of El Centro, where we worked in shifts around the clock to accompany the rover traversing across the harsh desert terrain. It crystalized the type of work I want to be doing: applied teamwork to deploy robots in extreme outdoor contexts, far from the built environment.