Space Shutter
A couple of local boys made good on a cosmic scale last week.
Doug Petercsak and Jim Sprunck, co-owners of a tiny Oxnard engineering and manufacturing firm, played a role in the Pathfinder spacecraft’s successful landing on Mars over the Fourth of July weekend.
Sprunck and Petercsak, both Fillmore residents, designed and built the mechanisms that position and point the stereo camera on the Pathfinder lander that has been beaming those images from Mars back to Earth.
“It’s the main camera that’s taking the beautiful panoramas you see on TV,” said Bill Layman, chief JPL engineer for the Sojourner and the Pathfinder lander’s chief mechanical engineer.
Layman was in Oxnard on Tuesday visiting the engineering firm, American Technology Consortium, to talk about a future mapping project of Earth’s surface.
“We were so happy with their performance,” he added. “Because if what they do doesn’t work, we don’t get our mission.”
Anyone who read a newspaper or watched TV in the past week knows that the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and NASA “got their mission.”
“We got VIP treatment at JPL in Pasadena when we were down there over the weekend,” said a still-exuberant Petercsak, back in his earthbound office in Oxnard.
“The motors, or actuators that we designed and made, are what are positioning the cameras,” he explained. “They can point the camera left or right, up or down.”
The 3-year-old firm with the big-sounding name actually employs just two other people.
That number might increase, however, now that Sprunck and Petercsak can attach a letter of recommendation from Mars Pathfinder project manager Anthony Spear with future project bids.
Although the Pathfinder mission will be considered a success even if it transmits data for just a few more days, it’s possible that the probe will dispatch information and pictures for a couple of more months.
No matter when the Pathfinder probe ends, it isn’t the end of Petercsak’s and Sprunck’s Martian-JPL connection. They have already signed on for the next Mars invasion. American Technology Consortium has delivered the camera-pointing mechanisms for JPL’s Mars ’98 mission.
“And we’re also supplying the robot arm motors for the mission,” Petercsak added.
The Oxnard firm came on board the ’97 mission “at the last minute, back in 1994.”
The original motor’s gearbox didn’t have an adequate design to drive the camera. “So we got a call and designed and made our motors in eight weeks,” Sprunck said. “We specialize in rescue type programs. We sell ourselves as specialists in rapid development.”
The firm was no novice in outer-space gizmos even then.
“We’ve done things in the past for the space shuttle, plus comet fly-bys and asteroid fly-bys,” said Petercsak matter-of-factly, as if an “asteroid fly-by” is something everyone designs before starting supper.
“An asteroid fly-by is a sample-and-retrieve mission that goes through a comet’s tail and picks up debris,” explained Sprunck, a Cal State Northridge graduate in electrical engineering. Petercsak is a mechanical engineer out of the University of Tennessee.
Sprunck and Petercsak are excited about the Mars ’98 project, the Earth surface-mapping project and, who knows, maybe even the 2007 mission in which JPL will send a spacecraft to Mars to pick up rock samples.
