NASA Scientist Alberto Behar died in a plane crash on Friday in Los Angeles – making a total of 74 Scientist dead in 2 years. Alberto Behar had helped to prove that there had once been water on Mars, having worked on two missions to Mars. He was also a robotics expert who researched how robots function in harsh environments (such as under water or inside volcanoes). The unusually high number of scientist deaths in recent years has made people question whether this death was suspicious or not.
The victim in Friday’s plane crash at a busy Los Angeles intersection was a longtime scientist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Alberto Behar, 47, died when his experimental aircraft dived into the street after takeoff.
The lone passenger killed in a Los Angeles plane crash Friday was a longtime scientist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Alberto Behar, a celebrated 24-year veteran with the federally funded robotics research facility, plummeted to the urban streets just after 1 p.m. local time, not long after takeoff.
The 47-year-old resident of Scottsdale, Ariz., was found dead at the scene of the crash, according to the Los Angeles County Department of Coroner, with his experimental plane smashed to pieces.
The craft was licensed to Alberto Behar Consulting LLC and determined airworthy in 1996, FAA registry data shows, but its latest status had been listed as “in question.”
Behard held a PhD from the University of California in electrical engineering and was an investigation scientist with the facility’s Mobility and Robotic Systems Section, according to JPL’s website, where he earned several awards for his work with NASA
He worked on the Mars Exploration Rover Mission that developed Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity, and he enjoyed designing planetary spacecraft tested on Earth’s most remote and extreme environments, according to his biography.
Behar had just taken off from Van Nuys Airport, where Bogart Monroy, a painter with the facility, had known him for the past 10 years.
It’s a sad day for us at the airport,” Monroy told the Los Angeles Daily News. “There are already a lot of people in mourning at the airport.”
He had a wife and three children, the paper wrote.
Some of his work was shown in a 2010 video where a “feisty little shrimp” latched onto his camera submerged 600 feet below an Antarctic ice sheet while his team investigated a subglacial lake.
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