2025/2026 Season
Embark on a journey of over two decades of space exploration with leading NASA Engineer Kobie Boykins. After working on the Mars Rover program, Kobie set his sights on more distant frontiers with his most ambitious mission–a circumnavigation of Europa, Jupiter’s icy moon. As Chief Engineer of this project, Kobie is leading a team to build and deploy a spacecraft that will take eight years to reach its target before it slingshots around Jupiter and begins its two-year orbit of Europa. The goal? To find out if there is water under the icy crust. Where there's water, there’s life. Join Boykins for a look into the latest discoveries and the future of interplanetary exploration.
About Kobie Boykins
Kobie Boykins is a lead principal engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In more than 25 years at the lab, he has worked on every Mars mission since Pathfinder, which took the first rover to Mars. Later, Kobie designed the solar arrays to power the Mars Exploration Rovers that sent images and data back to Earth, leading to the discovery that the surface of Mars once held water. In 2013, Kobie received a NASA Exceptional Service Medal, one of the highest honors given to NASA employees and contractors. In 2024, he will lead the NASA Europa Clipper mission, which will seek to determine whether the surface ice on Jupiter’s Europa moon holds liquid water beneath it—signifying the capacity for life—and to answer how water disappeared from Mars.
