donald c wegel

Donald C. Wegel received the B.S. degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA, in 2004. He began interning at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in 2002 and was hired into the Cryogenics and Fluids Branch in 2004, where he spent 14 years before moving to the Electromechanical Systems Branch to focus on mechanisms for the last six years. He spent well over a decade pursuing the dream of collecting a sample from a comet and returning this “primordial ooze of the solar system” back to Earth for in-depth study. He is currently working as the Lead Sample Acquisition Systems Engineer with the Dragonfly Drill for the Acquisition of Complex Organics (DrACO), continuing the search for the origins of life in our solar system.