Travels with Curiosity

Charles J. Byrne was educated as an electrical engineer at RPI (BS) and Caltech (MS). He interned with General Electric and RCA and then joined Bell Telephone Labs in Maurice Karnaugh’s Mathematics Research Department. Later, Byrne was recruited to join Bellcomm, a system engineering firm AT&T formed to support NASA headquarters for the Apollo Project. There, he was responsible for the gathering of information to support the selection and certification of landing sites on the Moon. Much of his work there was on remote sensing of the lunar surface with Lunar Obiter, which used photographic film in lunar orbit, scanned, and transmitted the images to Earth by analog communication.

Returning to Bell Labs and other AT&T subsidiaries, he worked on developing operation systems for communications networks and related national and international standards. After retirement, he developed software to process the images from Lunar Orbiter to remove the artifacts due to analog processing in orbit. This resulted in several books on the Moon, including one based on images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, still in operation.

DJ Byrne, Charles’ and Mary’s son, received his BS from RPI and his MS from USC. His career has been at NASA’s  JPL, run by Caltech, presently working on Mars 2020. He contributed the chapter on Mars 2020 and its Perseverance rover that is the next to advance the understanding of Mars.