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About

Hiro Ono is a pioneering roboticist and planetary scientist whose work is shaping the future of autonomous space exploration. His primary research areas focus on robotic operations for extreme environments, from the surface of Mars to the icy oceans of Enceladus. Ono’s most significant contribution is his leadership in the Robotic Operations team for NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover, where he was responsible for the strategic planning and uplink commanding of the rover’s mobility, robotic arm, and sampling systems. His paper on the first 210 solar days of these operations (20 citations) provides a critical summary and lessons learned for future missions. Ono has also advanced the development of autonomy testbeds for Ocean Worlds missions, enabling landers to make independent decisions under significant communication delays. His innovative concept for accessing Enceladus’s subsurface ocean through crevasses—without needing to drill—offers a low-resistance pathway to sample a potentially habitable alien ocean. Through this work, Ono is directly enabling the next generation of robotic explorers to venture deeper into our solar system than ever before.