Jaret Matthews joined JPL in the summer of 2003 after completing an internship in the Robotic Vehicles Group (now Robotic Hardware Systems). Prior to arriving at JPL, Jaret earned a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from Purdue University and a M.S. from ISU. He is presently working towards a M.S. in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford on evenings and weekends. Whilst in school, Jaret also interned with Pratt & Whitney's Rocket Propulsion Division in Florida and the NASA Haughton Mars Project in arctic Canada.

Jaret is presently serving as the project manager and lead systems engineer on the ATHLETE hex-limbed rover. He is also serving as project manager and lead mechanical/systems engineer on the Lunar Low Temperature Wheels and Advanced MEMS Prototype Mars Drilling System tasks.

Jaret has contributed to a diverse array of projects involving mobility, mechanization/actuation, and manipulation in extreme environments. Robots that he helped create have crawled in zero-g, sampled the ocean depths near Japan and Iceland, rolled across Greenland and the South Pole, punctured through ice shelves in Antarctica, and flown to the upper limits of Earth's atmosphere.

M.S. Mechanical Engineering (Present)
Stanford University Honors Cooperative Program
M.S. Space Studies(2003)
International Space University, Strasbourg, France
B.S. Aeronautics & Astronautics(2001)
Purdue University

JPL (2003 - Present)

• ATHLETE lunar rover (project manager, systems Lead, mechanical design)
• Advanced MEMS Mars Drilling System (project manager, mechanical design, system engineering)
• PAUSE Aerobot (high altitude balloon payload design, power/nav/telecom/ground station system design (two successful flights at 35km altitude)
• Hydrothermal Vent Biosampler (mechanical design, control & monitoring system design, successfully tested to 10,000 psi)
• Tumbleweed Polar Rover (payload design, construction, integration, testing, ground station software, successful air-drop tests in Antarctica)
• Antarctic Ice Borehole Probe (4 month deployment on Amery Ice Shelf, Antarctica)
• BioBalloon (high altitude balloon payload design)
• Spiderbot (zero-g aircraft deployment)

NASA Haughton Mars Project (Summer 2001 & 2002)

• Designed & built robotic human transport rover

Purdue University Rocket Propulsion Lab(Spring 2001)

• Designed, built, & tested bipropellant and hybrid rocket engines

Pratt & Whitney Liquid Rocket Propulsion (Spring 2000)

• RL-10 Rocket Engine Test Engineer

Mechanisims/mechatronics design, robotic systems engineering, extreme environment robotics

NASA Tech Brief Award: The Deep Sea Hydro-Thermal Vent BioSampler
NASA Tech Brief Award: Rover Actuated Tool Interface
NASA Tech Brief Award: Tumbleweed Rover - Technology Development for Advanced Mobility Concepts
NASA Tech Brief Award: JSC ISS Cell Growth Experiments with JPL Micro-Imagers