Keynote speaker
Keynote speaker
Kris Zacny
VP and Senior Research Scientist Honeybee Robotics
Dr. Kris Zacny is VP at Honeybee Robotics. His interests include space mining, sample handling, soil and rock mechanics, extraterrestrial drilling, and In Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU).
In his previous capacity as an engineer in South African underground gold, diamond, and coal mines, Dr. Zacny managed numerous mining projects and production divisions. This hands-on experience related to drilling and mining became invaluable in developing such technologies for space.
Dr. Zacny received his PhD (UC Berkeley, 2005) in Geotechnical Engineering with an emphasis on Extraterrestrial Drilling and Mining, ME (UC Berkeley, 2001) in Petroleum Engineering with emphasis on Drilling and Materials Science, and BSc cum laude (U. Cape Town, 1997) in Mechanical Engineering.
He participated in several Antarctic, Arctic, Atacama, and Greenland expeditions. Dr Zacny has over 200 publications and is a Principal Investigator of TRIDENT ice mining drill on PRIME1 lander and VIPER rover missions to the Moon that will launch in 2022 and 2023, respectively.