UMD and CALCE Alumni Dr. Anupam Choubey Worked on NASA’s New Mars Rover Mission

Dr. Anupam Choubey, a PhD graduate from UMD and CALCE was part of the team developing the camera technology on NASA’s Mars Rover Mission which aims to search for signs of ancient microbial life and explore the past habitability of Mars. NASA successfully landed the Perseverance rover on MARS on Feb 18th, 2021. CALCE congratulates JPL/NASA for this great achievement.

Dr Anupam Choubey received his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Maryland at the Center for Advanced Life Cycle Engineering (CALCE) in 2007. He has been contributing to electronics packaging for 15+ years and has led engineering development efforts for JPL missions such as INSIGHT, Mars2020, OSIRIS-REX, JUNO and EUROPA. He specializes in electronics technology development and utilizes his physics of failure (PoF) skill to develop innovative engineering solutions. He is currently working as Principal Microsystems and heterogeneous integration Engineer, developing packaging technologies at Draper Lab, Cambridge MA.

Survival in the Martian environment is a non-trivial task, Martian surface environment requires electronics to survive wide temperature swings ranging from -135C to 40C. Reliability of electronics especially becomes a challenging task to overcome the stresses developed due to these thermal excursions. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA team developed Engineering Enhanced Camera that is a collection of cameras used across the rover. CALCE alumni Dr. Anupam Choubey worked at JPL and played a critical role in the technology development and reliability of the cameras for the Perseverance rover. His work was published in IEEE aerospace conference “Thermally-resilient image sensor packaging approach for Mars2020 Enhanced Engineering Cameras”, March 2019, pp 1-10.

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Published March 2, 2021