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As President of PSS, Mr. Paluszek is responsible for company management. He is leading a project to develop a new optical navigation sensor for geosynchronous and deep space spacecraft. He is leading the Two Stage to Orbit Launch Vehicle project which employs horizontal take-off and landing and uses an aircraft first stage with a LH2 ramjet booster. He is supporting work on green buildings. He designed a new Vertical Axis Wind Turbine which is now entering the prototype stage. He also designed an electrical vehicle kiosk for recharging plugin hybrid and electric vehicles. He is also developing simulations for N on M missile interception scenarios.
He designed the Attitude Control System and ACS flight software for the OSC Indostar-1 satellite, which has been flying since 1997 and led the effort to develop the TDRS momentum management system for Hughes. Mr. Paluszek has developed commercial software products including the Spacecraft Control Toolbox, used worldwide for spacecraft simulation, analysis and control system design. He also developed the newly released Wind Turbine Control Toolbox for Matlab.
Prior to founding PSS in 1992, Mr. Paluszek was an engineer at GE Astro Space in East Windsor NJ. At GE, he designed the GGS Polar despun platform control system and led the design of the GPS IIR attitude control system and the Inmarsat-3 attitude control systems. The GGS Polar despun platform controller included active stabilization of the four deployed wire antennas using the despun platform motor. This was the one of the first applications of active vibration control on a satellite at GE. He also managed the ACS analysis unit and was lead attitude analysis on over a dozen satellite launches and shift supervisor, with responsibility for all subsystems, on one launch. This included flying over 100 satellite maneuvers.
As Vice President of PSS, Ms. Thomas is responsible for a wide range of corporate management tasks and manages the company in Mr. Paluszek's absence.
Ms. Thomas is the PI for a Phase I/II Air Force SBIR developing automated decision systems for onboard defensive counterspace operations. As lead engineer for PSS' solar sail attitude control work she manages the development of the Solar Sail Module for high-fidelity simulation of sailcraft control systems and has developed tools for analyzing flexible sail models. She has developed collision monitoring tools for the safe guidance mode of the Swedish Space Corporation's PRISMA mission and TechSat 21. Ms. Thomas was the PI for the Phase I NASA SBIR, "Comprehensive Solar Sail Simulation" (2006), a Phase II Air Force SBIR, "Autonomous Satellite Servicing to Increase Effective Mission Life", studying the proximity operations of escort satellites (2003), and on the Phase I NASA SBIR, "Integrated Multi-Range Rendezvous Control System" (2003).
Prior to rejoining the technical staff of PSS in February of 2001, Ms. Thomas worked at PSS in a series of internships since 1996. She has worked on a variety of software, including: artificial intelligence tools, an orbit propagation toolbox, and a multibody simulation of the TDRS spacecraft for momentum management verification.
As a Master's student at MIT, Ms. Thomas worked on the design of a Shuttle flight experiment to study the plumes of a Hall and a pulsed plasma thruster, known as ETEEV (Electric Thruster Environmental Effects Verification). This effort included experimental work in MIT's new vacuum facility. The design studies included analysis of a number of plasma diagnostics.
Mr. Mueller has served as the PI for several past projects as well. Under SBIR contracts for both the Air Force and Missile Defense Agency, he designed optimal guidance and control methods for high altitude airships. He also developed a decentralized system for formation flying guidance and control for NASA Goddard, and incorporated the underlying algorithms and methods into the Formation Flying Module of SCT. In support of PSS' defensive counterspace efforts, Mr. Mueller has helped design new methods for rapidly evaluating the vulnerability of space assets, and for robust onboard planning of evasive maneuvers.
Before joining PSS in August of 2000, Mr. Mueller completed his masters degree in the field of robust optimal control. He has research experience in H-infinity optimal control, mu-synthesis, and multivariable, gain-scheduled control using linear parameter-varying (LPV) techniques. For his masters thesis, he developed LPV controllers for flight-testing on NASA's F/A-18 System Research Aircraft. He has recently returned to the University of Minnesota and is now working towards a doctorate degree in aerospace engineering, with a research focus on optimal trajectory planning for stratospheric airships.
Ms. de Castro began work as a Mechanical Engineer at Princeton Satellite Systems in August 2009. Prior to working with PSS Ms. de Castro worked in the energy industry and has experience in generation, configuration management, load and price forecasting, and demand response.
At Princeton Satellite Systems, she designed an astronaut exercise machine for use on the ISS, on the lunar surface and in the Orion spacecraft. She is working on the mechanical design of a Vertical Axis Wind Turbine. She is also developing the mechanical design for the Optical Navigation System.
During her undergraduate career, Ms. de Castro performed research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Manufacturing and Productivity (LMP), where she developed manufacturing processes for electronics packaging. In addition to her research, Ms. de Castro has design experience with electromechanical devices for the visually impaired.
Dr. Pajer is a senior member of the technical staff at Princeton Satellite Systems. He is also Adjunct Professor of Physics at Rider University in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. Prior to joining PSS in 2010, Dr. Pajer was on the full time faculty of Rider University, and before that he was a member of the technical staff at Sarnoff Corporation in Princeton, New Jersey in their photonic integrated circuits group. His expertise is in the physics and application of optical devices. He has design and fabrication experience in discrete and continuous dynode vacuum tube photodetectors (single channel and imaging devices), plastic optical fibers, InP based photonic devices including laser sources, with applications in fields including oil well logging, aerospace, and medicine. Hardware that he had a hand in designing and building can be found in the Cassini, SOHO, and Defense Meteorological Satellite Program spacecraft, and in threat detection systems for fighter aircraft. He has also planned and outfitted several optical laboratories in the course of his career, and has built laboratory software suites in MATLAB and Python. He holds a patent for fundamental improvements made to a photonic spectroscopic device. At PSS Dr. Pajer contributes to the Integrated Communications and Optical Navigation System, and Autonomous Space Threat Detection programs, among others.
Ms. Cao develops software in C++ and Objective-C to support all of Princeton Satellite Systems' programs. She also manages the iPhone software product line. She is currently developing graphics plugins for VisualCommander using Cocoa.
While at the University of Washington, Ms. Cao co-designed and developed the iPhone application PNB Mobile for the Pacific Northwest Ballet in Seattle, WA. The application allows patrons to view upcoming performances, browse photo and video galleries, get directions to the performance venue, and connect with PNB's other social media outlets in an accessible mobile format. She also worked on various other projects, such as designing and developing single player games for Windows based PCs and exploring algorithms for the graphical rendering of fog through volumetric ray casting.
Mr. Razin does mechanical and electrical engineering work for projects such as the SunStation.
As a research intern at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory Mr. Razin, analyzed high-vacuum system and designed refueling processes for the Princeton Field-Reversed Configuration device (PFRC-2) for plasma fusion experiments. He performed system modeling and calculated flow characteristics, conductances, and valve dynamics.
As a research fellow at Princeton University, Mr. Razin designed and ran laser optics experiments; analyzed astronomical data for target optimization; created experimental software simulations; researched neural networking technologies and deformable mirror simulations; evaluated working software models with experimental data. At the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan he Designed, assembled, and tested optical systems for the Subaru Coronagraph Extreme Adaptive Optics (SCExAO) module. He also designed a test bed for surface characterization of specialized deformable mirrors.
Mr. Razin is an associate member of Sigma Xi and was awarded the John Marshall II Memorial Thesis prize at Princeton University.
Venkat has over 14 years of expertise in software design, development and architecture. He worked on multiple platforms and operating systems and has extensive hands-on experience in JEE, distributed, real-time communications and financial applications. A proponent of incremental and test driven development, he has been actively involved in all stages of software development life cycle including leading teams, vendor and customer interactions, SCM and release management. In the course of his career, he developed expertise in various programning languages including Java, C++, Ruby, Groovy, Erlang, Python, php and Delphi, extensively worked on various frameworks and application servers such as Spring, Hibernate, JPA, WebLogic, JBoss, WebSphere, NIST JAIN SIP, Microsoft OCS, Tibco Grid, on standards and protocols such as SIP, SOAP, RDBMS and UML and on databases like Oracle, MySql, Postgres, SQLite and Sybase.
His past employers include Goldman Sachs and Avaya Communications.