John C. Flemming, Director - Engineering Programs

John Flemming joins us following 41 years of technical excellence, 31 of which were with Martin Marietta/Lockheed Martin Corporation.

Mr. Flemming was the Program Manager for the Descent Imager / Spectral Radiometer (DISR) program. The DISR is a science instrument developed for the Huygens Probe mission to the atmosphere of Titan, a moon of Saturn. As an element of the Cassini mission, the Huygens Probe was developed by the European Space Agency. The DISR program accordingly contains a major international flavor involving principals from several nations. Key technologies in the DISR include CCD and InGaAs detector arrays, data compression, coherent fiber optics, and complex on-board data processing. The Huygens/DISR story continues today as Cassini/Huygens continues on its way to an encounter with Saturn and Titan. DISR will be in the news in the 2004-05 time frame. The Huygens probe will be released from the Cassini spacecraft on December, 25, 2004, arrive at Titan and plunge into the Titan atmosphere on January, 14, 2005.

In other positions at LMA, Mr. Flemming supported the FAME program out of Palo Alto Applied Technology Center. He served as a technical and managerial consultant assigned to monitor and coordinate efforts on the state-of-the-art CCD focal plane components. He also developed sophisticated performance models for the FAME system.

Mr. Flemming served as technical and management consultant on the development and flight production of star tracker CCD cameras for the Mars-98, Mars-01, Stardust, and Genesis spacecraft programs.

Earlier assignments included Independent Research and Development (IRAD) where he was Task Manager for Laser Communciations Technology. On the ITSS program he was lead engineer for a technology assessment task to evaluate the state-of-the-art in Infrared Space Surveillance Systems. On the Faint Object Spectrograph Program he was lead engineer for the detector subsystem. On the Multispectral Measurements Program he was proposal manager and program manager of a program, which conceived, designed, and developed a group of vacuum ultraviolet, photon counting radiometers.