PSS Staff and Resumes
- Michael A. Paluszek, President & Founder - map at psatellite.com
- Joseph Mueller, Senior Technical Staff - jmueller at psatellite.com
- Stephanie Thomas, Chief Engineer - sjthomas at psatellite.com
- Pradeep Bhatta, Chief Scientist - pradeep at psatellite.com
- David Wilson, Chief Software Engineer - dwilson at psatellite.com
- Paul Griesemer, Senior Technical Staff - griesemer at psatellite.com
- Ken Worley, Software Engineer - kworley at psatellite.com
- David Hoerl, Software Engineer - dhoerl at psatellite.com
- Eloisa de Castro, Mechanical Engineer - edecastro at psatellite.com
Mike Paluszek, President & Founder - map at psatellite.com
Education
- EAA Aeronautics and Astronautics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1979
- Aeronautics and Astronautics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1979
- SB Electrical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1976
Professional History
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.
Joseph Mueller, Senior Technical Staff - jmueller at psatellite.com
Education
- M.S. Aerospace Engineering, University of Minnesota--Twin Cities, 2000
- B.S. Aerospace Engineering & Mechanics, University of Minnesota--Twin Cities, 1999
Professional History
Mr. Mueller is the PI for a Phase I SBIR with NASA Ames. Under this project, PSS is developing the Integrated Mission Design Tool -- a new type of engineering application that connects several different design, analysis and simulation tools into a client server architecture so that a team of engineers may perform spacecraft and mission design work in a collaborative and convenient fashion. He is also the PI for a new Phase I SBIR with the Navy, to develop a decision-support tool that enables a requirements-driven reconfiguration of on-orbit spacecraft.
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.
Stephanie Thomas, Chief Engineer - sjthomas at psatellite.com
Education
- SM Aeronautics and Astronautics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001
- SB Aeronautics and Astronautics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1999
Professional History
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 to Increase Effective Mission Life Thruster Environmental Effects Verification). This effort included significant work in MIT's new vacuum facility. The design studies included analysis of a number of plasma diagnostics.
Dr. Pradeep Bhatta, Chief Scientist - pradeep at psatellite.com
Education
- PhD, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University, 2006
- MA, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University, 2006
- MS, Mechanical Engineering, Pennsylvania State University, 1999
- BTech, Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, 1998
Professional History
As a graduate student at Princeton University, Dr. Bhatta conducted research on nonlinear stability and control of autonomous underwater vehicles. He derived control laws for stabilizing desired gliding motions for different underwater glider control configurations. He designed an approximate trajectory-tracking method based on combining steady gliding motions for a conventional aircraft model.
Dr. Bhatta participated in the multi-institutional Autonomous Ocean Sampling Network project, which included sea-trials that demonstrated efficient ocean sampling using multiple observation platforms. He implemented formation control algorithms on groups of underwater gliders and an algorithm for real-time tracking of a surface drifter by an underwater glider.
As a graduate student in the Pennsylvania State University, Dr. Bhatta designed an active, discrete-time vibration absorber that was robust with respect to uncertainties in design frequencies , and provided good performance compared to existing absorber designs. As an undergraduate student at Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, he did a comparative study of different control algorithms for regulating sustained hopping motion of a one-legged robot model.
Dave Wilson, Chief Software Engineer - dwilson at psatellite.com
Education
- Cornell University
Professional History
Mr. Wilson is Chief Software Engineer at Princeton Satellite Systems. Mr. Wilson joined PSS in September 2001 through a co-op program with Cornell University and was subsequently hired as a full-time software engineer. Mr. Wilson oversaw the transformation of ObjectAgent into MANTA, PSS's "Messaging Architecture for Networked and Threaded Applications". As part of this effort, Mr. Wilson extracted the network functionality of ObjectAgent into an abstract networking software library, "PSSNet", which supports multiple protocols and provides a flexible framework for packet handling. Other improvements to MANTA included support for secure connections, zero-configuration networking, and network routing over arbitrary graph topologies.
In 2002, Mr. Wilson managed a performance and memory architecture revision of PSS's MatrixLib C++ software, delivering order-of-magnitude speed-ups in key areas of functionality while enhancing overall stability. In 2004 Mr. Wilson made additional improvements to MatrixLib enabling the software to act as an interface to the LAPACK and BLAS software libraries. MatrixLib and PSSNet have, in turn, both been leveraged to support Mr. Wilson's current primary project, "DSim". A distributed engine for engineering simulations, DSim provides an efficient and robust framework for rapid implementation of highly complex models.
In addition to DSim development and maintenance of MANTA, PSSNet, and MatrixLib, Mr. Wilson is actively involved in the VisualCommander project for distributed, reliable and reusable telemetry collection, command and visualization. He provides design and implementation support for the networked server components as well as the system's overall data handling.
Mr. Wilson focuses on UNIX system software, networked and distributed systems, and performance and optimization.
Paul Griesemer, Senior Technical Staff - griesemer at psatellite.com
Education
- PhD Aerospace Engineering, University of Texas at Austin, 2009
- MSE Aerospace Engineering, University of Texas at Austin, 2008
- BS Mechanical Engineering, Rice University, 2001
Professional History
As a graduate student at the University of Texas, Dr. Griesemer conducted research on trajectory design and optimization in multi-body dynamical systems. He created an automated routine for designing ballistic lunar capture transfers from low Earth orbit to a weakly captured lunar orbit that requires only a single impulsive maneuver to complete the transfer. He also applied concepts from optimal control theory to develop novel optimality conditions for the transfer of a satellite into a ballistically captured orbit. His graduate research was funded through the NASA graduate student researchers program, and he was selected to present his research as a NASA student ambassador at an international conference in Hyderabad, India.
Dr. Griesemer's current research interests include extending the capabilities of the algorithms developed in his dissertation for the Earth-Moon problem to general multi-body environments. He is also studying numerical optimization methods and their application to orbital pursuit/evasion games.
Ken Worley, Software Engineer - kworley at psatellite.com
Education
- University of Wyoming, 1989
Professional History
Mr. Worley has been a software engineer at Princeton Satellite Systems since 2009. He works remotely from Castle Rock, CO.
Mr. Worley has extensive experience with GUI development in Macintosh and Windows environments. From 1998 to 2001, he wrote a cross-platform application framework in C++ allowing for simultaneous development of GUI applications on Macintosh and Windows from a single codebase. The framework included support for platform neutral access to files, string handling, sound support, threading, and resource handling as well as the ability to change interface languages on-the-fly. During that time, he also wrote a memory manager utility providing a 10x increase in speed for repetitive operations as well as a styled text editing engine. In 2001, Mr. Worley helped in transitioning the commerical product QuarkXPress to run on Mac OS X and helped in updating its interface. In 2008, he updated his cross-platform application framework to also allow simultaneous development for the Cocoa APIs on Macintosh in Objective-C.
Mr. Worley recently participated in a Phase~I NASA SBIR on the development of a rapid end-to-end mission simulation and design tool. He developed a software tool, using CoreData on the Macintosh, allowing the import of spacecraft model data from Solidworks, and the utilization and manipulation of that data in simulations using Matlab and VisualCommander.
Mr. Worley's focus in software development at PSS is the maintenance and updating of VisualCommander, an application for distributed, reliable and reusable telemetry collection, command and visualization.
David Hoerl, Software Engineer - dhoerl at psatellite.com
Education
- BA, University of Delaware, 1972
- MSEE, University of Delaware, 1979
Professional History
Mr. Hoerl joined Princeton Satellite Systems Technical Staff in 2009, and is currently engaged on a wide variety of enhancements to VisualCommander. Earlier, he developed image processing algorithms and software for DuPont that analyzed gigabyte images used in an industrial process. His software was able to decompose 4GByte images into 1M objects in less than a second, two orders of magnitude faster than the commercial alternative.
After obtaining his MSEE. Mr. Hoerl went to Bell Laboratories, where he developed hardware and software for a variety of projects. His first project was a loop testing subsystem for the No 5ESS voice switch, which is still in use today. His next project was Datakit, a data networking product that was used by AT&T and the operating companies to provide wide area connectivity prior to the Internet. Notable contributions to this project were the Transparent Synchronous Module, which provided a universal serial port for synchronous devices, and an AppleTalk interface that supported wide area networking on a vast scale for AppleTalk compliant devices.
Before joining DuPont, Mr Hoerl managed several product developments, including a digital KVM switch, the customer premise interface to a network located service creation platform, and an ATM based Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexer.
Eloisa de Castro, Mechanical Engineer - edecastro at psatellite.com
Education
- SB Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2009
Professional History
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.