Pleasant Hill grad works on Mars Rover for NASA

By TIMOTHY MEINZEN/For The Herald — On his last day at Pleasant Hill High School, Jesse Grimes took the star that seniors were given into my room, stood on a chair and tacked the star to the beam above his desk.

“This is how you will remember me,” he said. That was 2003.

Just recently, Jesse told me in an email that he is exploring, not the stars, but the planet Mars. He was part of the team that designed the Mars Rover Perseverance, which landed on the planet Feb. 18.

Jesse, who is now married and goes by Grimes-York, helped design part of the robot arm that will collect samples of Mars rock and soil to check for, among other things, signs of life: ancient, fossilized microscopic life—if it exists.

Having grown up in Pleasant Hill, Jesse early on decided he wanted to work for NASA. At his mom’s urging, he decided that is what he wanted to do.

After graduating near the top of his class at Pleasant Hill in 2003, he spent a year at Lane Community College to learn drafting, then transferred to the engineering department at Oregon State University. During his time there he became involved with a robotics team. That work experience propelled him into an internship with Jet Propulsion Laboratories in Pasadena, Calif., where his work ethic and smarts got him a job offer.

JPL works on space program projects and eventually the long hours made Jesse look into a job with Elon Musk SpaceX program or NASA. He chose NASA because he was starting a family and wanted to be present for his two boys, Orion and Atlas.

Jesse took a job at NASA, moved to Houston and began working on the Mars Rover team as a roboticist. Lunchtime conversations at NASA are incredible and amazingly fun.

“What would it take to build a robot to work on Saturn’s moon Enceladus?”  The people who work at NASA have such a variety of backgrounds but are passionate about their work and interesting people to know also impressed Jesse.

The greatest challenge for his work was to create something that could work under the extreme atmospheric conditions of Mars. Temperatures that plunge to -80 F to 70 F on a good day. In addition to the rapid changes in temperature for delicate robotic equipment, the thin atmosphere does not prevent the deadly effect of radiation on equipment.

“We design these things (the Rover) so tough that they exceed their life spans.”

Once his team built a “bomb-proof” model that could be sent along on the mission. Rover will soon employ the robot to collect samples for future retrieval.

For all his excitement in working on the Mars Rover, Jesse was not eager to travel there himself. He has a lovely wife and two beautiful kids. No reason to trade that for an icy, desert-like planet that is extremely hostile to human life.

But the opportunity to travel vicariously from the comfort of our homes draws the imagination of millions, especially that of a Billie whose star on the beam at the old high school building still points to the heavens.

Timothy Meinzen has taught history and publications for 30 years at Pleasant Hill High School. Although he retired in 2019, he continues to teach on a year-by-year contract and supervises The Billie Bulletin student newspaper and the yearbook.