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Arwen Dave

Project Engineer

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Arwen Davé serves as flight systems engineer at NASA ARC, where she has worked with Mars, Moon, orbital, and atmospheric flight hardware. Recently acquired skills include lunar mission operations for the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) as an instrument operator for the Neutron Spectrometer System. 

Ms Davé has been a Project Manager for 10+ years, with background in 14 successful manned and robotic missions, 25 prototype development efforts, and over 90 proposals. Ms Davé transitioned from troubleshooting machines to overseeing systems to helping groups work better together. She has worked on the giant solar array masts that power the International Space Station, tested a drill for Mars, upgraded the water recycling system for astronauts, organized a moon-and-Mars gravity parabolic flight, and coordinated a simulated rover mission in the Atacama Desert in Chile.

Her contributions to the NASA ARC Flight Instrument Group (FIG) include the development of weather and geologic context-related instruments Mars Sonic Anemometer, the Mars Doppler Wind & Thermal Sounder (DWTS), and a wind-born dust saltation sensor. 

A seated figure in the desert holds a cord up in the wind to find the wind speed.
Arwen Dave, a systems engineer at NASA’s Ames Research Center, uses an anemometer to find the wind speed during field tests of a prototype Mars rover in the Atacama Desert.

Education

Project Management Coursework, leadership, communications, scalability

University of California, Santa Cruz 2013-19

Project Management Coursework

NASA Academy of Program/Project & Engineering Leadership (APPEL) 2011

B.S. Mechanical Engineering

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, B.S. Mechanical Engineering 1989

Experience

Project Manager/SE, NASA, Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA 2021-present

Project Engineer, Millennium Engineering, Inc, Moffett Field, CA 2016 – 2021

Project and Systems Engineer, Wyle Laboratories, Moffett Field, CA 2015– 2016

Mechanical Engineer, Lockheed Martin Space, Sunnyvale & Moffett Field, CA 1997 – 2015)

Selected Peer Reviewed Publications

Murbach M, Davé A, Gordley L, Colaprete A, Salas A, Boateng K, Brock A, Mooney-Rivkin M. (2023) The Doppler Wind Temperature Sensor Flight Evaluation and Experiments (TES-16,17), 37th Annual Small Satellite Conference, Science/Mission Payloads – Research & Academia II

Conference Publications

Jha V, Colaprete A, Cook A, Garrett M, White B, Ngo K, Davé A (2021) Balloon Flight for NephEx: A Nephelometer for In-situ Particles Detection in Planetary Atmospheres, AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts