Mastcam-Z
Photo of Justin Maki

Justin Maki

Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Caltech

Dr. Justin Maki has ~30 years of experience developing, testing, calibrating, and operating flight instruments for NASA planetary missions.  He has expertise in Mars surface imaging, flight instrument hardware development, instrument calibration, image processing, instrument operations, and rover/lander surface operations. Although his main expertise is imaging systems development and operations, he has also worked on spectrometers and photometers.  Maki worked as a graduate student on the Cassini UVIS instrument hardware development team at the University of Colorado, Boulder in the early 1990s.  Upon receiving his PhD in 1996, Maki worked on the Mars Pathfinder imaging team as a postdoc at the University of Arizona, Tucson.  Maki joined JPL in 1997.  Since then he has worked on a number of Mars missions, including the Mars Exploration Rover project, the Mars Science Laboratory project, the Mars InSight project, and the Mars 2020 project.  Maki has participated in the development of over 50 flight instruments on 6 NASA planetary missions in various roles, including instrument scientist, systems engineer, operations lead, and co-investigator.  Justin Maki is the Mastcam-Z Deputy Principal Investigator.  He is also the Mars 2020 Imaging Scientist and the Mars 2020 Instrument Operations Team Chief.  Maki has a B.A. in Physics (magna cum laude), an M.S. in Aerospace Engineering Sciences, and a Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering Sciences, all from the University of Colorado, Boulder.  He also has a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Pepperdine University.