People

Dr. Mircea Badescu has been a mechanical engineer, technologist and mechatronic engineer in  the Non Destructive Evaluation and Advanced Actuators and the Robotic System Development groups of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for 22.5 years. He joined JPL in February 2005 after serving as a Caltech Postdoctoral Scholar for a year. He has design, robotics, mechatronics and systems experience in aerospace, automotive, academia and defense industries: concept development, design, fabrication and end-to-end demonstration of sample acquisition, processing and transfer systems for extreme environments of planetary exploration, including cryogenic to extreme temperature, vacuum to high pressure, low gravity and no gravity environments; design integration of power piezoelectric devices; design and integration of precision actuators and mechanisms and optical components; design and testing of underwater scuba diving equipment; design of automotive haptic devices;  organize and conduct field tests including high altitude and Alaska glaciers, Antarctica, desert and zero-g; systems development leadership and task management. He is coauthor of 156 publications and book chapters, 24 patents, 108 NTRs, and received 56 NASA, JPL and Tech Brief awards.