Boise Man Roots For Mars Pathfinder
Dan Champion never gave much thought to outer space until a group of engineers showed up at his machine shop carrying pieces of a Mars Pathfinder prototype.
When the real Pathfinder parachutes through the thin Martian atmosphere Friday, Champion’s heart will be pumping a little faster.
How well the parachute and lander functions will be a direct result of the tests that engineers performed two years ago in the southwestern Idaho desert and Champion’s machine shop.
“I’ll be so excited I won’t be able to sit down,” Champion, 36, said Tuesday. “I’ve never thought much about stars or other planets until they opened the doors for me. I’ve thought a lot of times, ‘Why me?’ when there were so many bigger shops.”
The machine shop became a testing laboratory for engineers working to perfect the Pathfinder’s landing gear. In September and October 1995, engineers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., tested prototypes of the Pathfinder parachute and lander in the desert south of the city.
“Some of the parachute design changes we made were a result of our tests in Boise,” said Sam Thurman, a systems engineer for the Mars Pathfinder Project in Pasadena. “It was a very important series of tests. We used the data to make sure the whole entry-descent landing system would work successfully in Mars.”
How well the lander held up during testing was important because after the descent Friday, the lander’s walls will unfold like a blooming flower and release the 23-pound roving robot.
The rover, named Sojourner, resembles a flat toy wagon. At Champion’s shop, engineers built full-size aluminum mock-ups of the Pathfinder’s lander - a funnel-shaped shell that houses the rover.
The models were attached to parachutes and dropped about a mile from a helicopter to measure various outcomes.
“We’d load the parts on a trailer and drive out by the bombing range,” Champion said. “Their computers would collect 7,000 bits of information in a minute and a half. They’d come back to my shop at noon and work until midnight to download the data and make repairs to do another drop test the next day.”
After each drop test, Champion helped engineers reassemble the damaged shells.
Normally, Champion works on welding, repairs and manufacturing. He got involved in the Pathfinder tests through a friend in the aeronautics industry.
Thurman said engineers chose Boise as a testing site because it has wide open spaces and little air traffic.”It really wasn’t that big of a deal at the time. It was just a job that needed to be done,” Champion said. “But looking back, it’s a total different feeling to think I was able to partake in space exploration. I wish I would have taken more pictures.”