{"id":4841,"date":"2026-07-18T22:05:40","date_gmt":"2026-07-18T22:05:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nextcitydigest.com\/?p=4841"},"modified":"2026-07-18T22:05:40","modified_gmt":"2026-07-18T22:05:40","slug":"mill-valley-native-helps-steer-mars-rover-team-to-victory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nextcitydigest.com\/?p=4841","title":{"rendered":"Mill Valley native helps steer Mars rover team to victory"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Jesse Deuel\u2019s personal philosophy is to \u201cshoot for the highest things you can see.\u201d Recently, he\u2019s taken a more literal approach to that goal.<\/p>\n

Read more Foodborne illnesses at restaurant chains are rare but can sicken customers, roil businesses<\/a><\/p>\n

The Mill Valley native recently graduated from the Missouri University of Science and Technology after spending all four years on the school\u2019s Mars Rover Design Team. The team just won its second consecutive championship at the annual University Rover Challenge, hosted by the nonprofit Mars Society in a remote part of Utah.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe competition is extremely stressful,\u201d Deuel said, \u201cbut also the most fun I\u2019ve ever had.\u201d<\/p>\n

Deuel currently lives in Los Angeles, where he just started a job at Impulse Space, a startup founded by former SpaceX engineer Tom Mueller that aims to create a sort of \u201cride-share\u201d for satellites that want to move from low Earth orbit to other orbits.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think I share the opinion of a lot of people in the industry, where they want to see us go to Mars,\u201d Deuel said. \u201cI\u2019m so new to it that I just want to develop my own skills so that I can make a real contribution.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a kid, Deuel wasn\u2019t exactly the archetypal dreamer one associates with space exploration in pop culture through movies like \u201cContact,\u201d staring out at the stars with big, wide eyes. Rather, his interest in space comes largely from the technical side of things; his parents threw a lot of extracurriculars at him as a kid, and programming was the one that stuck.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey put me in a couple of creative writing camps, and I never had quite the talent for that,\u201d he said. \u201cI was never doodling on my pages in class; I\u2019ve never been very artistic. The logic of electronics and that kind of thing, I like a lot.\u201d<\/p>\n

Missouri S&T\u2019s Mars Rover Design Team has a complex leadership structure, including leaving the design of the rover largely in the hands of freshmen.<\/p>\n

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\u201cIt\u2019s kind of a funny decision from a technical perspective,\u201d Deuel said. \u201cIf we wanted to make the most technically capable rover, then we\u2019d have all the seniors design it, and it\u2019d get done probably twice as fast. But then those seniors would graduate, and nobody who\u2019s left on the team would know how to do that. So we have a great rover for one year, and then the team would die.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to Deuel, the rover that wins a competition typically isn\u2019t the most technically capable but the most tested. The design and manufacture of the rover takes place mostly in the first semester, followed by testing, which can be difficult in the un-Mars-like terrain of Rolla, Missouri.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of the design decisions about our wheels and how well they\u2019ll be able to grid the terrain are educated guesses,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Then comes the competition in Hanksville, Utah, one of a few designated places on Earth with Mars-like conditions; others are in Australia, Canada and Poland, each with their own associated rover competition.<\/p>\n

Read more Hazardous materials incident sickens 8 staff members at Salinas Valley State Prison<\/a><\/p>\n

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\u201cI really can\u2019t put into words how much it really does look like Mars,\u201d Deuel said. \u201cThere\u2019s not a plant in sight. It\u2019s all rolling barren hills with large rock formations around them, and it really looks like a different planet.\u201d<\/p>\n

Athena, the Missouri S&T rover, performed with a score of 496.57 out of 500 \u2014 more than 50 points ahead of both the second-place rover and their own winning score from 2025.<\/p>\n

Though Athena made it out of the competition in one piece, a lot of other rovers aren\u2019t so lucky.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt this last competition, one team drilled into the ground, forgot to pull it out and started driving,\u201d Deuel said. \u201cThese kinds of failures happen all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard not to assign human qualities to the rovers, and it\u2019s inevitable that their creators bond with them over the long testing period.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe first time it drives in the year is a huge celebration,\u201d Deuel said. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of like seeing your kid take its first steps.\u201d<\/p>\n

As such, the rover competition has an emotional charge that\u2019s deeper than just the nerve-wracking feeling of watching something you\u2019ve invested a massive amount of time and effort into creating perform on unpredictable terrain with a high risk of failure.<\/p>\n

\u201cDuring our testing, before we get to the competition, we want to push them as far as we can,\u201d Deuel said. \u201cBut that\u2019s hard to do when you have this one system, and if it breaks, it\u2019ll be a huge amount of work to fix it. You also feel that sense of connection with it, so it\u2019s sometimes hard to watch when you\u2019re driving really hard in testing.\u201d<\/p>\n

The one question Deuel always gets asked is if the rovers actually make it to Mars. Very few do \u2014 the cost of sending something to space is prohibitively expensive, and only NASA and the China National Space Administration have landed rovers on the Red Planet to date. Sending something back from Mars, at this moment in the development of space technology, is out of the question.<\/p>\n

If competing in Utah is nerve-wracking, imagine the stakes involved in the maintenance of an actual Mars rover. Two of the six rovers that have been sent to Mars are now dead, with Opportunity succumbing to dust storms and Spirit stuck in quicksand. Curiosity is still active, but its wheels have taken a beating after decades traversing Mars\u2019 rugged surface.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur previous rover could get a top speed of 25 miles an hour, and the rovers on Mars are running at 2 to 3 miles an hour or so,\u201d Deuel said. \u201cThey\u2019re also designed by really smart people, not freshmen.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Word Game: July 18, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jesse Deuel\u2019s personal philosophy is to \u201cshoot for the highest things you can see.\u201d Recently, he\u2019s taken a more literal approach to that goal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4840,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4841","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-things-to-do"],"yoast_head":"\nMill Valley native helps steer Mars rover team to victory - Next City Digest<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/nextcitydigest.com\/?p=4841\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Mill Valley native helps steer Mars rover team to victory - 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