Peter Theisinger raised the IQ of any room he entered. The man considered a giant at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who worked on missions to six planets and landed three NASA rovers on Mars, has died after a long illness. He was 78.
“The things we do at JPL, if we’re doing it right, are groundbreaking and change our understanding of our place in the world, and you need a certain boldness and self confidence to do that,” said Adam Steltzner, who worked with Theisinger as lead engineer of the team that landed the Curiosity rover on Mars in 2012. “Pete had all of that, but he also had a humility in the face of it. He was a titan of the Mars program.”
Steltzner, chief engineer of JPL’s Mars Sample Return program, said Theisinger remained a mentor to him until his passing, on June 26.
“It’s hard to distill the influence Pete had and the toll his passing leaves, he was foundational at JPL,” he said. Theisinger inspired his team to higher standards and was bright, kind and demanding in the best sense of the word.
“He was a straight shooter, a sort of all-around person in so many ways,” said Richard Cook, who shared project manager duties with Theisinger for the Curiosity rover mission to Mars. The two were named to Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2013.
Cook, now JPL’s deputy associate director for strategic integration, said Theisinger was a great leader who was able to motivate his team and be clear about his expectations, “and he was the first person to be complimentary when they did something amazing and everyone appreciated that.”
A summer job in 1967 led Peter Theisinger to JPL. He ended up spending 50 years there, working on missions to six planets and leading the charge to historic explorations of the solar system. (Photo courtesy of NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory)
Even though the two leaders were the only ones officially designated to meet the press after the Curiosity rover successfully landed on Mars in 2012, Theisinger encouraged his team to walk across the stage with them, in front of the press corps as well as NASA and JPL officials.
“He was so inclusive of people,” Cook said.
The two spent many lunch hours in Cook’s office, commiserating over things that went wrong with the project.
“But we’d also talk about every other thing under the sun,” he said. “Pete had a million other interests and we would talk politics and movies. I cherish those times.”
Theisinger, a longtime resident of La Crescenta, led major unmanned space science flight missions in his 50 years with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His work with the NASA rovers Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity earned him a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017 from the National Air and Space Museum, joining the ranks of Neil Armstrong and John Glenn.
Ed Stone, director of JPL, wrote that year that Theisinger is the latest heir “of NASA’s long history of building brilliant unmanned spacecraft and dispatching them around the cosmos.”
Describing the engineer and project manager as energetic, inquisitive and smart, Stone said he did a stellar job “sending a one-ton spacecraft to a planet tens of millions of miles away, lowering it to the surface by cables and setting it free to roam about.”
Theisinger’s legacy continues in the work Jennifer Trosper does as project manager for the Mars 2020 Perseverance mission, which is searching for signs of ancient microbial life on the Red Planet. Theisinger interviewed her for a job at JPL about 30 years ago.
“He was like a father figure to me, wise, encouraging, had my best interest in mind, I learned so much from him, and I have so much great respect for him in the way he led our team,” Trosper said. “I was this farm girl from Ohio, and there could have been a lot of reasons not to believe in me and what I could do but he did. In my opinion, he was unparalleled at JPL and across NASA. I loved him.”
Trosper credits Theisinger for her growth as a leader.
“The things I do well you could attribute to Pete,” she said. “He empowered us and believed in us. Those were some of our best days because we were working for Pete.”
The Fresno-born Theisinger graduated with a physics degree from Caltech in Pasadena. A summer job at JPL, which Caltech manages for NASA, in 1967 sparked a lifetime spent at the research and development center. Theisinger contributed to the 1967 Mariner mission to Venus, the 1971 Mariner orbiter mission to Mars, the 1977 Voyager mission to outer planets of the solar system, and the 1989 Galileo mission to Jupiter. Before retiring in 2013, he managed JPL’s engineering and science directorate and its spacecraft systems engineering section. He also helped start the Mars 2020 Project that built the rover Perseverance.
Accepting his lifetime achievement award at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., Theisinger joked about how he came by his full head of gray hair.
“I’ve seen missions to planets, I’ve seen missions to primitive bodies, flybys, orbiters, landers, I’ve seen a lot,” he said.But he said his biggest achievement wasn’t the “great bits” about landing Mars explorer rovers and leading the charge to explore our solar system.
“Any time you do a job well, when you feel like you accomplished something, you go home that day and say, ‘I made a difference,’ I think that’s a high point in your career,” Theisinger said.
A celebration of life is planned in August.
Theisinger is survived by his wife Dona, four children William, Peter, Jeffrey, Tracy and Kelly, and granddaughter Sienna.
Originally Published: July 19, 2024 at 2:33 p.m.
