2022

NASA Group Achievement Award: Dan Gaines

MARS 2020 SURFACE ENGINEERING OPERATIONS TEAM For outstanding contribution to the health and performance assessment of engineering systems and planning of activities for every sol on the Perseverance rover

NASA Group Achievement Award

ISS AUTONOMY & INSTRUMENT PROCESSING DEMO TEAM For demonstrating autonomy and instrument processing software on the Spaceborne Computing 2, Qualcomm Snapdragon and Intel Myriad computers on the International Space Station.
Alberto Candela Garza
Steve Chien (Team Lead)
Faiz Mirza
Jason Swope
Lauren West

2021

Early Career Public Achievement Medal: Andrew Branch

For early-career achievement in developing and testing autonomous systems for NASA’s Ocean World exploration.

NASA Group Achievement Award: Dan Gaines

MARS 2020 CRUISE ANOMALY RESPONSE TEAM For anomaly response and resolution, which resulted in keeping the Mars 2020 spacecraft safe in the face of multiple hardware-based anomalies during mission operations.

NASA Group Achievement Award: Dan Gaines

MARS 2020 CRUISE SEFI RESPONSE TEAM For successfully responding to Single Event Functional Interrupt (SEFI) anomalies during Mars 2020 Cruise, as well as contingency planning and procedure development in preparation for entry, descent, and landing approach.

NASA Group Achievement Award: Dan Gaines

MARS 2020 ENGINEERING OPERATIONS DEVELOPMENT TEAM For the development and delivery of the Mars 2020 engineering operations systems and processes, culminating in a successful test campaign and readiness for surface operations.

NASA Group Achievement Award: Dan Gaines

MARS 2020 LCAE MISSION OPERATIONS TEAM For the planning, development, and execution of launch, cruise, approach, and EDL (LCAE) in the face of significant challenges, resulting in the successful landing of Perseverance.

NASA Group Achievement Award: Andrew Branch, Dan Gaines, Gregg Rabideau, Vincent Wong

MARS 2020 ROVER FLIGHT SOFTWARE TEAM For outstanding technical achievement in the development of Rover Flight Software and its successful execution in all phases of the Mars 2020 mission.

NASA Group Achievement Award: Amruta Yelamanchili

MARS 2020 ACTIVITY PLAN AND SEQUENCE SOFTWARE TEAM For exceptional achievement in the design and development of highly innovative and effective uplink software enabling successful Mars 2020 operations.

NASA Group Achievement Award: Nihal Dhamani

MARS 2020 COMMON SOFTWARE AND SERVICES TEAM For outstanding development of innovative cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity, and common software services, enabling secure, reliable, and capable Mars 2020 mission operations.

MSL Discovery Award: Evan Clark

For exceptional achievement in developing the Rover Planner Tachical Time-Management procedures resulting in consistent Rover Planner tactical support and better prepared trainees.

MSL Team Award: RSVP Software User Test Development Team

For outstanding achievement in developing an improved user testing process for the RSVP Toolset resulting in more efficient and thorough test results that increase the reliability and robustness of the delivered tools.

Early Career Spotlight: Evan Clark

JPL Director's Review and Discussion

2020

NASA Early Career Public Achievement Medal: Amruta Yelamanchili

For early career achievement in advancing mission operations automation capabilities critical to the success of the ECOSTRESS prime mission.

NASA Group Achievement Award: ECOSTRESS Anomaly Response Team

For achievement in the investigation, development, test, and deployment of a new onboard data storage system which enabled ECOSTRESS to successfully complete its prime mission.

NASA Group Achievement Award: ECOSTRESS and ISS Operations Team

For exceptional operations of ECOsystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station, and completing the prime mission.

NASA Group Achievement Award: ASTERIA Extended Mission Team

For ingenious use of a CubeSat that had met its primary goals, to conduct groundbreaking experiments in autonomy and communication, and achieve key scientific investigaitons.

NASA Group Achievement Award: MSL SOL2172 Anomaly Recovery Team

For outstanding technical achievement during the Sol 2172 MSL recorded data anomaly collecting critical data, reformatting, and restoring the preferred computer to operability.

NASA Group Achievement Award: Multi-Mission Execution Technology (MEXEC) Team

For exceptional innovation in creating the lightweight, multi-mission, autonomous plan, scheduling, and execution technology, MEXEC.

Voyager Award: Andrew Branch

For developing and deploying marine autonomy as well enhancing and initiating key partnerships in this area with NRL, MBARI, and WHOI.

Voyager Award: Evan Clark

For outstanding leadership in the conceptualization of the IceNode instrument concept.

Team Award (MOSAIC): Martina Troesch, Tiago Stegun Vaquero (AI Group Members)

Demonstrating distributed systems operation and automation on multiple science cases including Venus, Mars, and the Moon.

Team Award (ASTERIA): Martina Troesch, Faiz Mirza (AI Group Members)

For outstanding achievement in the demonstration of autonomy capabilities onboard and in testbed for the ASTERIA mission.

Team Award (Island): Elly Shao, Evan Davis, Russell Knight, Ryan Harrod (AI Group Members)

For successful delivery of key elements to ensure operational success of the Island Technology Project

2020 Notable R&D Project: IceNode

JPL Office of the Chief Scientist and Chief Technologist.

2019

NASA Exceptional Technology Achievement Medal: Dr. Daniel Gaines

For exceptional technology achievement in the development of self-reliant rover technologies showing significant increase in mission productivity for future NASA rovers.

NASA Group Achievement Award: The Self Reliant Rover Team

For the development and demonstration of self-reliant rover technologies, greatly expanding the productivity of future Mars robotic explorers.

Voyager Award: Amruta Yelamanchili

For outstanding technical accomplishment in the development and deployment of automated scheduling for the ECOSTRESS mission, contributing to mission success despite ring buffer, Mass Storage Unit, and radiation reset challenges.

Team Award: MSL FED/FEST Team

For the successful development, testing, and implementation of end to end Feed Extended Drilling and Sample Transfer which returned sampling capability to MSL following the failure of the feed mechanism on MSL.

NASA Group Achievement Award: MSL Drill Recovery Team

For exceptional achievement in recovering the MSL drill capability using innovative feed-extended drill and sample delivery techniques.

Voyager Award: Steve Chien

For outstanding leadership and technology development in the deployment of automated scheduling for the ECOSTRESS mission.

2018

Group Achievement Award: Mark Johnston, Danny Tran, Martina Troesch, and the DSN FtSO Team

For transitioning NASA's Deep Space Network to the innovative Follow-the-Sun Operations paradigm, increasing the efficiency of support to NASA deep-space missions.

Team Bonus Award: Mark Johnston, Danny Tran, and the LCM Team

To the DSN Follow-the-Sun Opperations Link Complexity and Maintenance Team: for the successful completion of the Link Complexity and Maintenance Tool.

Team Award: Jagriti Agrawal, Wayne Chi

For outstanding technology development leading to multiple publications and infusions into the M2020 Ground System

Voyager Award: Amruta Yelamanchili

For above and beyond support during instrument checkout and science operations for ECOSTRESS.

Voyager Award: Chris Davies

For outstanding technical achievement in the development and application of mission analysis for techniques leveraging automated scheduling technologies to assess mission configurations' overall mission return leading to improved mission design.

Voyager Award: Martina Troesch

For outstanding technical achievement in the development of marine autonomy techniques to leverage ocean models for autonomous station keeping in vertically profiling floats and autonomous glider-based tracking of ocean science features.

2017

Charles Elachi Award for Oustanding Early Career Achievement: Michael A. Trowbridge

For exceptional technical accomplishments in developing automatic methods for accurately assessing observation capabilities to achieve areal coverage.

Explorer Award for Stategic Leadership: Russell L. Knight

For exceptional leadership in the development of mission analysis capabilities for accurate assessment of observational capabilities of missions.

2016

USV Swarm II Team Bonus Award: David Brown, Steve Schaffer, and the SwarmII Team

For designing, developing, and demonstrating state-of-the-art multi-agent autonomy for ONR's "Swarm" maritime robotics program. Achieved on the 2nd of October, 2016.

Exceptional Public Service Medal: Daniel Tran

For exceptional service in technology development and deployment, advancing NASA's autonomy capabilities for space missions and the Deep Space Network.

JPL Explorer Award: Daniel Tran

For development and infusion of autonomy technology for Rosetta Orbiter science planning and Deep Space Network requirements-based scheduling.

ESTD Team Bonus Award: Dan Gaines, Gregg Rabideau, Steve Schaffer, and the SRR Team

For outstanding contributions to the Mars Science Laboratory case study resulting in an increased understanding of productivity challenges and opportunities.

IND Team Award: Daniel Tran, Martina Troesch, and the SSS Team

The team successfully completed the development and deployment of the next generation DSN realtime scheduling system.

2015

ESTD Team Bonus Award: Steve Schaffer and the DARPA ACTUV Autonomy Team

In recognition of your outstanding team accomplishments in supporting the highly successful FY 14-15 efforts to innovate, substanially improve, integrate and deliver a state-of-the-art motion planner to ASW Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV) DARPA supplier for integration into Sea Hunter, DARPA's new unmanned surface vehicle for the ACTUV program. JPL's motion planner for the first time ever provided for the ACTUV program both a novel deliberative planner for high-level navigation and also "rules of the road" behavior for open ocean interactions with other surface traffic as a Navy Force-Multiplier.

NASA Group Achievement Award: Steve Chien, Gregg Rabideau, Daniel Tran, Martina Troesch, Joshua Doubleday, and the rest of the US-Rosetta Team

For support to Rosetta mission in environment characterization, science planning, and navigation leading to successful landing of Philae on the coment.

Magellan Award for Outstanding Senior JPL Management: Steve A. Chien

For outstanding leadership in the application of automated science planning technologies in partnership with ESA for the Rosetta Mission

NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal: Steve A. Chien

For exceptional achievement in developing science-scheduling automation enabling Rosetta science operations to adapt quickly to changing comet and mission.

NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal: Gregg R. Rabideau

For outstanding and sustained contributions in technology development and deployment, advancing NASA's capabilities in ground-based and onboard spacecraft autonomy.

ESTD Team Bonus Award: Steve Schaffer and the Navy USV SWARM Demo Team

In recognition of your outstanding team accomplishment in supporting the highly successful, first-time-ever, demonstrated JPL CARACaS Intelligent Autonomous Mission-level Control & Hazard Avoidance / Situational Awareness Architecture for the coordination of 5-8 Unpiloted Sea Surface Vehicles to prove out SWARM Technology as a Naval Force Multiplier for cost- and warfighter- effective ship defense for the US Navy in the high-profile ONR/OSD exercise August 2014 on the James River, VA.

2014

Exceptional Technology Achievement Medal: Russell Knight

For revolutionary development of geometry-aware and coverage observation planning techniques, impacting numerous NASA missions.

NASA Group Achievment Award: Joshua Doubleday, Steve Chien, and the IPEX Team

For outstanding performance in the development and operation of the IPEX/CP-8 Cubesat advancing new technologies for future autonomous science observations systems.

2013

Exceptional Technology Achievement Medal: Tara Estlin

For exceptional technological achievement in onboard rover autonomy leading to operational deployment on the Mars Exploration Rovers and further missions.

Exceptional Achievement Medal: Daniel Gaines

For outstanding contributions to the Mars Science Laboratory flight software, including key insights contributing to the resolution of the Rad750 reset anomaly.

NASA Group Achievement Award: Mark Johnston, Daniel Tran, and the SSS development team

For outstanding innovation in the development of new DSN scheduling software for web-based collaborative schedule creation and negotiation.

2011

NASA Software of the Year Award (Winner): Tara Estlin, Robert C. Anderson, Benjamin Bornstein, Michael Burl, Rebecca Castano, Charles de Granville, Daniel Ganes, Michele Judd, David Thompson

For the Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science (AEGIS) technology and its implementation abord the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) Opportunity.

NASA Software of the Year Award (Honorable Mention): Troy Ames, Matthew Handy, Vuong Ly, Daniel Mandl, Frederick Policelli, Donald V. Sullivan, Patrice Cappelaere, Steve Chien, Ashley G. Davies, Joshua Doubleday, Mark Johnston, David McLaren, Gregg Rabideau, Steven Schaffer, Daniel Tran, Linda Derezinski, Stuart Frye, Robert Sohlberg

For the Sensorweb Toolbox and it's application to a wide range of Earth Science and disaster monitoring including volcanism, flooding, and wildfires.

AIAA Intelligent Systems Award: Steve Chien

To recognize important fundamental contributions to intelligent systems technologies and applications that advance the capabilities of aerospace systems, presented to Steve Chien for pioneering achievement in deploying AI-based planners on spacecraft to enable event detection and response and sensorweb capabilities for earth-observing and planetary missions.

NASA Group Achievment Award: Tara Estlin, Robert C. Anderson, Ben Bornstein, Michael Burl, Rebecca Castano, Charles de Granville, Daniel Gaines, David R. Thompson

For the development of the Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science (AEGIS) technology and its implementation on the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) Opportunity.

NASA Group Achievment Award: Daniel Tran, Gregg Rabideau, Steve Chien, Steve Schaffer, Daniel Mandl, Russell DeHart

For outstanding technical achievement in developing automated mission planning techniques to substantially increase observation scene count capabilities of the EO-1 mission.

NASA Group Achievment Award: Terrance Huntsberger, Hrand Aghazarian, Christopher Assad, Harry Balian, Charles Bergh, Lorena Carrillo, Robert Chan, Tien-Hsin Chao, Tara Estlin, Carol Fisher, Daniel Gaines, Michael Garrett, Andrew Howard, Eric Kulczycki, Yoshiaki Kuwata, Thomas Lu, Lee Magnone, Curtis Padgett, Brandon Reese, Steve Schaffer, Robert Steele, Anna Stern, Robert Stirbl, Helen Tanabe, Julie Townsend, Ashitey Trebi-Ollennu, David Trotz, Gabriel Udomkesmalee, Richard Volpe, Michael Wolff, Gail Woodward, David Zhu

For exemplary performance in development and transition of first-of-its-kind intelligent autonomy technology derived from NASA flight missions to the US Navy maritime domain.

2010

Best Applied Research Paper: S. Chien, D. Tran, G. Rabideau, S. Schaffer, D. Mandl, S. Frye

For paper entitled "Timeline-based Space Operations Scheduling with External Constraints" presented at May 2010 International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling, Toronto, Canada.

2009

NASA Honor Award: A. Castano, A. Fukunaga, J. Biesieadecki, L. Neakrase, P. Whelley, R. Greeley, M. Lemmon, R. Castano, B. Bornstein, S. Chien

To the MER Onboard Dust Devil Cloud Detection Team for design implementation and deployment of algorithms for automated detection of dust devils and clouds onboard the Mars Exploration Rovers.

2007

NASA Group Achievement Award: Gregg Rabideau, Daniel Tran, Steve Chien

To the Earth Observing One Sensorweb Team for outstanding achievement in the development of an operational 24/7 autonomous Earth Observing sensorweb integrating multiple space and ground sensors.

2006

NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal: Steve Chien

In recognition of outstanding leadership of the Autonomous Sciencecraft and Sensorweb efforts on Earth Observing One.

Level A Bonus Award: Steve Chien

In recognition of outstanding leadership of the Autonomous Sciencecraft Experiment, enabling flight validation of autonomy software to enable increased science return and reduced operations costs.

2005

NASA Software of the Year Award: Co-Winner ASE

Steve Chien, Daniel Tran, Ben Cichy, Gregg Rabideau

The Autonomous Sciencecraft Experiment software is a co-winner of the 2005 NASA Software of the Year Award, for its ability to monitor and respond to scientific events without ground intervention and the entailed increase in science return and reduction in operations costs. ASE is no longer an experiment: it is the primary mission operations software for EO1.

Section 317 Team Award for Excellence: Tara Estlin, Daniel Gaines, Caroline Chouinard

For outstanding contributions to the OASIS Development Team leading to the successful demonstration of autonomous planning and scheduling for rover operations.

NASA Group Achievement Award: Gregg Rabideau, Daniel Tran, Steve Chien

For outstanding accomplishments in demonstrating, as part of the Earth Observing-1 mission, the potential for space missions to increase total engineering and science data return by using spacecraft autonomous decision making.

NASA Group Achievement Award: Gregg Rabideau, Daniel Tran, Steve Chien

To the Livingstone on Earth Observing-1 Team

NASA Group Achievement Award: Gregg Rabideau, Daniel Tran, Steve Chien

Autonomous Sciencecraft Experiment

Best Paper Runner-Up: Daniel Tran, Steve Chien, Gregg Rabideau, Ben Cichy

For "Safe Agents in Space: Preventing and Responding to Anomalies in the Autonomous Sciencecraft Experiment" at AAMAS 2005 Workshop on Safety and Security in Multi-Agent Systems, Utrecht, Netherlands, July 2005. +PDF (CL#05-1321)

Level A Bonus Award: Daniel Tran

For Scientific and technical excellence: Outstanding technical achievements in flight software development and resolution of multiple inflight anomalies critical to the success of the Autonomous Sciencecraft experiment enabling flight validation of autonomy technology for future missions.

2004

Best Paper in Session

For "Onboard Autonomy on the Earth Observing One Mission," at the 1st AIAA Intelligent Systems Technical Converence, Chicago, IL, September 2004.

2003

NASA Space Act Award: Brad Clement, Tony Barrett, Rus Knight, Gregg Rabideau

For work on Abstract Reasoning for Multiple Rover Coordination.

NASA Space Act Award

The ASE software team was awarded a NASA Space Act Award in recognition of "Significant Scientific and Technical Contributions to NASA" for "Software for the TechSat 21 Autonomous Sciencecraft Experiment (ASE)."

2002

Best Software Prototype Paper Finalist

For "The Techsat-21 Autonomous Space Science Agent" at Agents 2002 Conference, Bolonga, Italy, July 2002.

2000

NASA Exceptional Service Medal

Steve Chien

Granted for significant sustained performance characterized by unusual initiative or creative ability that clearly demonstrates substantial improvement in engineering, aeronautics, space flight, administration, support, or space-related endeavors which contribute to NASA programs.

NASA Group Achievement Award: ASPEN Development Team

In recognition of outstanding achievement in the design, implementation, and deployment of an advanced planning and scheduling system for spaceflight mission operations automation.

NOVA Leadership Award: Tara Estlin

For demonstrating leadership quality by open dialogue and direction to many tasks and achievement of goals for these tasks.

1999

Honorable Mention, 1999 NASA Software of the Year - ASPEN: Steve Chien, Gregg Rabideau, Russell Knight, Robert Sherwood, Alex Fukunaga, Ben Smith, Forest Fisher, Tara Estlin, Tony Barrett, Anita Govindjee, Andre Stechert, David Yan

Co-winner, 1999 NASA Software of the Year - Remote Agent: E. Gamble, Jr., B.D. Smith, D.E. Bernard, N.F. Roquette, E. Gat, Y.-W. Tung, G.K. Man, S.A. Chien, S. Davies, G. Rabideau, D. Yan, Daniel L. Dvorak

Group Achievement Award - Adaptive Problem Solving Team: Mike Burl, Steve Chien (Team Lead), Darren Mutz, Andre Stechert

In recognition of breakthrough advances in statistical learning techniques enabling significant performance improvement in adaptive systems for automated planning and scheduling and optimization.

Group Achievement Award - Deep Space One Flight Software Team: (For Remote Agent Experiment Planner): Steve Chien, Anita Govindjee, Gregg Rabideau, Ben Smith, Todd Turco, David Yan

In recognition of outstanding achievement in the design, development, and demonstration of an advanced autonomous agent for spacecraft control.

Group Achievement Award - Deep Space Terminal (DS-T) Team: Steve Chien, Tara Estlin, Forest Fisher, Darren Mutz

In recognition of outstanding achievement in the design, development, and demonstration of an advanced autonomous Deep Space Communications Station.

NOVA Award - Adaptive Problem Solving (APS) Team: Steve Chien (Team Lead), M. Burl, D. Mutz, A. Stechert

In recognition of breakthrough advances in statistical learning techniques enabling significant performance in adaptive systems for automated planning and scheduling as well as optimization.

NOVA Award - Automated Rover Sequence Generation Demonstration Team: Steve A. Chien, G. Rabideau (Team Lead), P. Backes, E. Chalfant, K. Tso

In recognition of outstanding achievement in design and demonstration of an advanced planning and scheduling system for automation of rover command generation and validation.

NOVA Award - Multi-Rover Integrated Science Understanding System (MISUS) Team: Eric Mjolsness (Team Lead), Tara Estlin, Becky Castano, Tobias Mann, Alex Gray, Gregg Rabideau, Darren Mutz, Steve Chien, Ashley Davies

In recognition of outstanding achievement in design, implementation, and demonstration of a distributed architecture for multi-rover science exploration.

1998

Group Achievement Award - Automated Synthetic Aperture Radar Image Processor (ASIP) Development Team: Steve Chien, Forest Fisher (Team Lead), Ronald Greely, Edisanter Lo

In recognition of outstanding achievement in design, implementation, and deployment of an advanced planning system for science data analysis.

Group Achievement Award - DATA-CHASER Automated Planning and Scheduling (DCAPS) System Development Team: Steve Chien, Tobias Mann, Gregg Rabideau (Team Lead), Jason Willis

In recognition of outstanding achievement in design, implementation, and deployment of an advanced planning and scheduling system for mission operations automation.

NOVA Award - DCAPS Planning Systems Team: Steve A. Chien, William C. Eggemeyer, Tobias P. Mann, Gregg R. Rabideau (Team Lead), Jason Willis

In recognition of outstanding achievement in research and development in the DCAPS planning system.

NOVA Award - Deep Space Terminal Prototype Automation Team: Steve A. Chien, Tara A. Estlin, Forest W. Fisher (Team Lead), Raymond K. Lam, Darren H. Mutz

In recognition of outstanding achievement in research and development in Deep Space Terminal Prototype Automation.

NOVA Award: Russell Knight

In recognition of the Commitment to Excellence demonstrated by Russell Knight working on improvements to the ASPEN planning and scheduling system.

NOVA Award: Gregg Rabideau

In recognition of the outstanding efforts made by Gregg Rabideau in the development and deployment of automated planning and scheduling technology.

NOVA Award: Ben Smith

In recognition of the outstanding leadership that Ben Smith has demonstrated on the New Millenium Deep Space One Planning Engine development task, solving complex technical problems and performing many system engineering duties.