Who is DrChip?

As you might surmise given my last name of Campbell, I'm of Scottish descent. The background is the official Campbell tartan. If you're interested in Campbell clan stuff, check out Clan Campbell Society.

My wife and I have four wonderful children, two girls and two boys, who do well at school and play soccer (that's football for you Euro types) and basketball. They all play piano and at least one other instrument. J plays tuba and bass guitar; he made the all-county band this year; C plays saxophone, clarinet, and electric guitar; L played trumpet and is now enrolled at University of Maryland. N played clarinet and is now enrolled at Virginia Tech. My wife works as an x-ray technician and a magnetic resonance imager technician. I work at Goddard Space Flight Center as an engineer.

I've graduated from Springbrook High School, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (VPI&SU), Princeton University, and Purdue University. I have my doctorate from Purdue University in robotics, although I am currently working with the Global Positioning Satellite system for the Space Station at Goddard Space Flight Center, Nasa. I received a MSEE from Princeton University (Systems) and my Bachelor's from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Electrical Engineering. The only reason why I don't also have a Bachelors in mathematics is that I needed to take another year of French -- and didn't. C'est la vie!

I worked on the Microwave Anisotropy Probe (MAP); I was responsible for the Sun Acquisition and Safehold control modes. Sun acquisition mode was a critical oneshot - when MAP was ejected from the Delta rocket which launched it, it was spinning in a more or less arbitrary orientation. The sun acquisition control mode had only so much time (battery power) to dampen the spin and acquire (point the solar cells to) the Sun. Safehold is a control mode that the MAP satellite will go into if something goes awry; it only uses coarse sun sensors (which are basically photocells and hunks of plastic). The idea is to get the spacecraft into a stable control mode while the ground figures out what went wrong and what, if anything to do. I was on a Cub Scout campout the weekend that MAP was launched, so I asked a guy who'd just come on site if he'd heard anything about MAP. Since he hadn't a clue as to what MAP was obviously it was all right (one can depend on the media for bad news). It turns out that MAP was well within its Sun acquisition capabilities in terms of initial momentum (by about a factor of 7) and it managed to go into Safehold just after Sun acquisition. So, both my modes got an early workout. Anyway, the MAP scientists just released a picture of the baby Universe (apparently its now a teenager at 13.7Gyr):

Contact

My email is: NdrOchip@ScampbellPfamily.AbizM. Take out the NOSPAM embedded therein and it'll work. Hate e-spam.

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Last Modified Jun 06, 2008 04:57:33 PM

© 2008, Charles E Campbell, Jr.