Andres Mora

Dr. Andres Mora Vargas is the NASA Ames Research Center's Astrobee Facilities Engineering Lead and the NSS Instrument Lead Systems Engineer.

Dr. Mora Vargas builds maps of the International Space Station (ISS) to enable the autonomous navigation of the Astrobee free-flying robots inside various modules of the ISS and has developed software tools that evaluate the coverage quality of these maps. He has also worked on Astrobee's software development, hardware verification and is the point of contact for multiple Astrobee Guest Scientists such as JAXA, ESA, and MIT.

Additionally, Dr. Mora Vargas works as the Neutron Spectrometer System (NSS) Instrument Lead Systems Engineer designing, prototyping, manufacturing, and deploying an interface to allow the NSS instrument to be used on a Lunar prospecting robotic mobility mission.

Dr. Mora Vargas also worked as BioSentinel's Science Operations Center Software Lead and was in charge of the data acquisition from the four segments of the mission, its storage, manipulation, and distribution to the science team.

He also led the design, development, and deployment of the Gravity Offset System (GOS) to support the experimental evaluation of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s MARS 2020 Helicopter, Ingenuity. MARS 2020 mission sent a rover together with an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to improve understanding of the area around the rover and the imagery provided by the satellites orbiting the planet. The GOS is a one degree-of-freedom system simulating the gravity conditions of Mars perceived by the helicopter through autonomous control of the tension force on a cable attached atop of the helicopter. Ingenuity became the 1st self-propelled aerial vehicle to operate in Mars.

Dr. Mora Vargas received his Ph.D in Aerospace Engineering at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan. Dr. Mora Vargas has worked in elite research centers such as Japan's Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International, NASA's Johnson Space Center, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Ames Research Center. He holds a US patent, authored and co-authored book chapters, peer-reviewed journal and conference papers, has served as reviewer for several publications and is an IEEE Senior Member. He co-organized the 1st and 2nd Central American Space Congress and was selected as a Karman Pioneer 2024.

Dr. Mora Vargas is fluent in Spanish, English, and Japanese. He enjoys travel, movies, photography, scuba diving, soccer, and playing the saxophone.