Sarah Elizabeth McCandless works for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) as a navigation engineer. She has flown eleven different missions exploring our solar system, including the Mars Perseverance rover, Artemis I, Psyche, and Europa Clipper. Working as an “interplanetary Google maps”, she ensures we know a spacecraft’s location and can precisely predict its trajectory to ensure successful orbit insertion about or landing on another planet or body. In 2024, she was selected for NASA’s Human Exploration Research Analog (HERA) Campaign 7 Mission 3 and served as an “analog astronaut”, simulating a mission to Mars for 45 days at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. McCandless earned a Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering and minor in French at the University of Kansas, and earned a Master of Science in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, focusing on orbital mechanics. Outside of work, she enjoys running, camping, piloting Cessna 172s and traveling with friends and family.
