John's Bio            Up Close and Personal
An Interview with John Marriott

Combining degrees in physics, math, business administration and finance with nearly 20 years of experience at Ball Aerospace, John Marriott brings an important details and results-oriented approach to the Deep Impact mission. John is responsible for all phases of design, fabrication, integration and test, calibration, launch support, and operations as well as cost and schedule control, of Deep Impact's two spacecraft and three science instruments.

Prior to Deep Impact, John proved his mettle as program manager for the SIRTF IRS program, NASA's highly visible fourth Great Observatory. On this cost-capped NASA program, John worked closely with Cornell University and JPL where he employed spacecraft instrument design and business management expertise to provide insights into cost-saving methods and analysis to overcome setbacks without impacting delivery of the final instrument.

Following a request from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in 1988, John was instrumental in developing and supporting development of surface mount technology procedures for NASA and supporting the surface mount technology implementation team at Ball Aerospace. John also participates in an ongoing Ball Aerospace team to evaluate printed circuit board vendors and manufacturing techniques in order to support critical program designs.

John has been involved with managing other key programs such as Solar Heliospheric Observatory Ultraviolet Coronagraph Spectrometer (SOHO UVCS). Working closely with Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and Goddard Space Flight Center, the program required business and technical coordination between NASA, European Space Agency, Alenia, and Matra-Marconi.

John has worked in various capacities on the following programs:

• Solar Heliospheric Observatory Multianode Microchannel Array (SOHO MAMA)
• Power Reactant Storage Assembly (PRSA) in support of the space shuttle
• Solar Array and Antenna Mechanism (SAAM)
• Advanced Liquid Helium Dewar
• Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA)
• Kepler
• Odyssey
• Astrobiology Explorer (ABE)
• Venus Environmental Satellite (VESAT)

Before joining Ball Aerospace, John worked on special assignment in the U.S. Air Force.

Biographical details contained on these pages were correct during the Deep Impact mission which ended in 2006. Several scientists from Deep Impact are now working on related missions such as EPOXI and Stardust-NExT.