Dr. Powtawche Valerino

Dr. Powtawche Valerino

Dr. Powtawche Valerino is a guidance engineer who works for Aerodyne Industries, an aerospace engineering and information technology services firm based in the NASA-Marshall Space Flight Center in Cape Canaveral, FL. Additionally, she works as a navigation engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She obtained her undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from Stanford University and both her masters and doctoral degrees in mechanical general engineering, with a concentration in aero-astronautics, from Rice University. 

She helps in planning and designing maneuvers for unmanned spacecraft missions that travel into deep space. She helps to determine whether specific changes need to be made or maneuvers performed to maintain the trajectory of the spacecraft. She is among a handful of scientists that helped to report on, and maintain, the Cassini Mission to Saturn well beyond its original timeline (was supposed to be 4 years but ended up lasting 17). Most recently, she worked on the Parker Solar Probe, the closest man-made spacecraft to ever approach the Sun. It is expected to get as close as 4 million miles (1/10th the distance between Mercury and the Sun) and is to analyze the outer atmosphere of the Sun and its contents. In total, after eventually using Venus as a speed brake, it will complete 24 revolutions around the Sun before the mission is set to end in 2025.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/powtawche-valerino

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/meet-powtawche-valerino-jpl-navigation-engineer-who-personifies-chen/

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/11/science/parker-solar-probe-launch.html