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About

Jacek Sawoniewicz is a pioneering researcher in autonomous space exploration systems, with a focus on developing intelligent robotic capabilities for planetary missions. His work spans three critical areas: lunar exploration, autonomous rover navigation, and lander autonomy for Ocean Worlds missions. Sawoniewicz's most impactful contribution is the Moon Diver concept (32 citations), a Discovery-class mission proposal that leverages lunar mare pits to understand secondary crust formation—building directly on Apollo-era discoveries to advance planetary geology. He is also the lead architect of MAARS (Machine learning-based Analytics for Automated Rover Systems, 29 citations), a JPL initiative bringing self-driving technologies to Mars and the Moon by integrating the AI revolution with the High Performance Spaceflight Computing platform. More recently, Sawoniewicz has developed a Lander Autonomy Testbed for Ocean Worlds missions (5 citations), enabling autonomous sampling under extreme environmental uncertainty. His work is instrumental in shifting planetary exploration from human-in-the-loop operations to fully autonomous systems, addressing the critical challenge of operating spacecraft in deep space where communication delays make real-time control impossible.