Robert C. Tausworthe, Ph.D.
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As rocket scientist |
As Iron Chef |
Dr. Robert C. Tausworthe is a retired Senior Research Engineer and Chief Technologist of the Information Systems Development and Operations Division of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. During his tenure at JPL, he served as Supervisor of the Telecommunications Research Group, Software Chief Engineer of Deep Space Network Digital Systems, Manager of JPL's Institutional Software Standards development, Deputy Software Manager of the Galileo Project, and Principal Engineer of Deep Space Network Metric Prediction Generation software development.
After a 40 year career at JPL, he remained professionally active as a paid one-day-a-week consultant to JPL for another 10 years in the application of celestial mechanics to automation of the Deep Space Network.
He was a member of the NASA Technical Committee on Software Systems, the NASA Intercenter Autonomous Systems Working Group, the NASA Software Management and Assurance Program Steering Committee, and the NASA Software Advisory Council. He also was a member of the AIAA Software Systems Technical Committee.
He also taught at New Mexico State University, University of Southern California, and West Coast University, in Los Angeles on a part-time basis for over 22 years in the fields of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, and Computer Science
He is the author of the two-volume set, Standardized Development of Computer Software (Prentice-Hall, Inc.), thirty papers in software methodology and analysis, over one hundred papers in communications theory and mathematics, eleven NASA Tech Briefs, three NASA COSMIC programs, and almost five hundred internal JPL engineering and mathematical studies. He was co-investigator in the Celestial Mechanics Experiment of the Mariner V mission to Venus, and innovated the first planetary ranging system, used by that experiment. He was principal engineer in the development of the software that generates all uplink and downlink frequency, antenna pointing, and view period event automation products that are now used regularly by every deep space mission serviced by that network.
Dr. Tausworthe is a Fellow of the IEEE and a member of the ACM and Sigma Xi. He has received the NASA Exceptional Engineering Achievement Medal, the NASA Exceptional Service Medal (shown in the Iron Chef photograph above), and four NASA Outstanding Performance Awards. He received the BSEE degree from New Mexico State University in 1957, and the MSEE and Ph. D. degrees from the California Institute of Technology in 1958 and 1963, respectively. He was named a Distinguished Centennial Alumnus of the College of Engineering at New Mexico State University in 1988.