Katherine Winchell
Katherine has been involved with the Perseverance mission since the summer of 2016 when she assisted her undergraduate research professor, Dr. Melissa Rice, in the organization of a Mastcam-Z team meeting at Western Washington University. After graduating with her Bachelor’s in geology, she joined the MSL team at Malin Space Science Systems in 2018. At MSSS Katherine performed both uplink and downlink operations for the Mastcam, MAHLI, and MARDI instruments on the Curiosity rover, as well as uplink operations on the WATSON instrument of the Perseverance rover. She also performed Mastcam-Z calibration operations in the clean room at MSSS. In 2023 Katherine joined the team at ASU as a research analyst where she performs Mastcam-Z downlink operations.