Biography
Michael Ravine is the Advanced Projects Manager at Malin Space Science Systems (MSSS) in San Diego. At MSSS he has managed the development of cameras that are currently orbiting the Moon, orbiting Mars, on the surface of Mars, orbiting Jupiter ,and at the asteroid Bennu. He managed the development of four cameras on the Mars Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars in 2021. Currently he is leading the development of two cameras for a mission to the largest metal asteroid, Psyche, one camera to image the permanently shadowed regions at the Moon’s poles from a Korean lunar orbiter, and ten cameras for the Dragonfly Titan drone mission.
On the side, he was a producer on a feature film (Nobel Son), worked for James Cameron on an undisclosed space project, managed payload development for an internet startup to fly a private unmanned mission to the Moon (Blastoff!), and helped found a Web company back when the internet was new.
Originally trained as a scientist, Ravine has a B.S. in physics from Caltech, a Masters in geology from Brown and a Ph.D. in geophysics from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UCSD. As part of that life, he’s done field work in Montana, Iceland, Hawaii, Antarctica and someplace in the middle of the ocean a thousand miles south of Australia.
Web links
Malin Space Science Systems: https://msss.com/
Presentations (2)
“A Year of Perseverance at Jezero Crater, Mars”
The Mars 2020 mission delivered the rover Perseverance to the surface of Mars in February 2021. To date is has traveled nearly 5 kilometers (3 miles) from its landing site, named for the late science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler. In this talk Dr. Michael Ravine — who managed the development of four cameras on board Perseverance — will describe what the rover has told us so far and will share amazing images from the Martian surface.
“From San Diego to the Solar System”
When people ask “Which organizations are involved in exploring space?” the usual answers include government entities like NASA and the European Space Agency or large corporations like United Launch Alliance and SpaceX. But a much smaller firm based right here in San Diego has had an outsized impact on the exploration of the solar system. In this talk (with lots of images!) Dr. Michael Ravine, Advanced Projects Manager at Malin Space Science Systems, will tell the story of how this local business came to provide cameras for missions to explore Earth, the Moon, asteroids, Mars, and Jupiter, and describe upcoming missions to Venus, Saturn’s moon Titan, and more.