Dr. Kelsa Palomares is a Nuclear Systems Engineering Manager with Analytical Mechanics Associates. With a PhD in Nuclear Engineering and experience at NASA, Dr. Palomares can speak to a wide range of the industry and how you can prepare yourself.
Some of her current responsibilities include:
Reactor sub-system lead for industry-led nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) flight demonstration mission definition study (September 2019 - September 2020)
- Responsible for the implementation of the systems engineering approach for reactor subsystem designs for a nuclear thermal propulsion flight demonstration.
- Work with a large and diverse engineering team and industry reactor participants to survey a wide tradespace of options for a NTP flight demonstration mission.
- Guide industry participants in the development of reactor designs capable of meeting stakeholder key performance parameters (or other design parameters), study objectives, and cross-industry system interfaces through data calls and technical interchange meetings.
- Contribute knowledge of reactor system and summarize industry reactor participant inputs with other internal systems (engine, spacecraft) and technical leads (mission concepts, programmatic)
- Facilitate subject matter expert review and strengths, weaknesses, opportunity, and risk (SWOR) assessment of reactor concepts to provide insight into design commonalities, key technical challenges and unique design attributes based upon reactor configuration and fuel design.
- Communicate the design space and key technical challenges to NASA space nuclear propulsion project and other government stakeholders via presentation and reporting deliverables.
