Can’t wait for Dent: Space San Francisco to see our speakers onstage? Never fear. We, along with some of the top experts in commercial space travel are headed to California this week for San Diego Comic-Con. Appearing with us at #SDCC is Rebekah Sosland Siegfriedt who is speaking on our panel “Mars Needs People: Putting Humans on the Red Planet”

After receiving her B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Texas in 2013, Rebekah “Bekah” Siegfriedt started her career at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She has worked on two different Mars Rovers as a Systems Engineer; spending her first two years as a Flight Director, Test Bed Lead, and Flash Tiger Team Lead for the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) and Opportunity.

Since then, Siegfriedt has begun planning mission operations for the next Mars rover, Mars 2020. On the Mars 2020 mission, she is the Mission Operations Downlink Systems Engineer, helping design the system that will plan the rover’s daily activities including caching samples, taking rover selfies, and producing oxygen for a potential manned missions to Mars!