One of the lowest cost planetary missions NASA has ever conducted, Deep Space 1 (DS1) was designed to take risks so subsequent missions would not have to. Following its successful 1998-1999 prime mission to test high-risk technologies, DS1 embarked on an ambitious two-year extended mission dedicated to comet exploration. However, it soon suffered a hardware failure widely considered to be catastrophic, ironically unrelated to the new technologies. The loss of the sole star tracker deprived the spacecraft of three-axis attitude knowledge.

The small JPL operations team then undertook one of the most remarkable deep-space rescue missions in the history of space exploration. It took more than two months just to point the high gain antenna to Earth. After seven months of intensive and stressful work, they uplinked a new system to replace the star tracker. DS1 resumed thrusting with its ion propulsion system shortly after that. The team encountered and overcame further daunting challenges in the subsequent 15 months, and in 2001 they succeeded in acquiring NASA's first close-up images of a comet nucleus and other unique data.

Marc Rayman is JPL's chief engineer for mission operations and science and is a JPL fellow. He has worked on a wide variety of missions to explore the cosmos, including as chief engineer, mission director, and project manager on Deep Space 1 (the subject of his talk) and on Dawn, as chief engineer on Psyche and StarLight, and in other roles on Spitzer Space Telescope, Mars Observer, and Topex/Poseidon. He was part of the tiger team that recovered Voyager 1 earlier this year from a serious anomaly and has served in advisory capacities on many other missions. He has also worked on many mission concept studies, including Mars Sample Return, multiple spacecraft optical interferometers, and more. He began at JPL in the development of deep-space optical communications. A space and science enthusiast since the age of four, Marc decided when he was nine that he wanted to get a PhD in physics and work for NASA, but it was a few more years before he did. Eventually, however, he earned an AB in physics from Princeton University and an MS and PhD in physics from the University of Colorado in Boulder. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics before joining JPL.