Posted by tourdemars to General News at February 11, 2004 12:00 PM

The veteran NASA engineer who oversaw development of the first Mars rover has been named director of Paul Allen's Experience Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame. "When they said they were looking for a director, I got very excited," Donna Shirley said yesterday. "I thought it would be a really fun thing to do." Shirley, 62, who previously served on the museum's advisory board, began working on the Mars program at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1966 and became the first woman to manage a project for NASA, the billion-dollar Mars Exploration Program.