Suzanne Dodd

Dodd with a sheet of vellum that shows the timeline of commands communicated to Voyager 2 during its closest approach to Neptune on Aug. 25, 1989

Suzanne R. "Suzy" Dodd is an American project scientist of multiple NASA spacecraft missions.

Biography Dodd was born in Tacoma, Washington and grew up in Gig Harbor in the same state. Her parents were from New York City. She received a BS degree in Engineering and Applied Science from Caltech (1984), a BA degree in Math/Physics from Whitman College (in Walla Walla, Washington), and an MS degree in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Southern California.

Dodd was hired by Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in 1984 as a sequence design engineer for the Voyager 2 during its flyby of Uranus; she became the lead sequence engineer who designed the closest approach sequence for the Neptune flyby. She left Voyager in 1989, and worked on the mission planning team for the failed Mars Observer mission (1990-1993) and on the Cassini mission to Saturn, where she had a team of around 40 people. She worked on Cassini for six years (1993-1999).

Dodd was a project manager of the Spitzer Space Telescope and the manager of the Spitzer Space Telescope Science Center at Caltech since 1999; a project manager of the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) (2012-2016); a manager of NASA's Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC). In 2010, she became the tenth project manager of the Voyager program. Voyager was already on an extended mission; in 2012 Voyager 1, and in 2018 Voyager 2 crossed the heliopause and entered interstellar space. Theoretically, the spacecraft have enough power until c. 2032; after that there wouldn't be enough power for communication systems.

Selected publications