Gaia People

Mark ter Linden

European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC)

Mark ter Linden studied aerospace engineering and computer science. In 1990 he joined Fokker, at the time a large aerospace company in Holland, later moving to their space division (which subsequently became an independent company, Fokker Space, later Dutch Space and is currently part of EADS Astrium). Here he was mainly involved in the development of data processing software for Earth Observation missions. Mark was design leader for the software for the OMI instrument on NASA's Aura satellite, launched in 2004. He was also involved in several study projects, mainly related to computational grids.

In 2004 Mark became involved in Gaia with a project to demonstrate the use of computational grids for Gaia's data processing. In 2006 he moved from Holland to Spain to become a member of the Gaia SOC team at ESAC. Currently, he is working mostly on IDT and the Main Database.

Mark left Gaia in December 2011.

[Published: 24/09/2007 | Updated: 04/01/2012]