KHTS Radio Santa Clarita Radio – Santa Clarita News
There are more than 400 Jet Propulsion Lab employees — 440 to be precise — living in the Santa Clarita Valley.
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These scientists, engineers and technicians from the SCV help further our understanding of science, technology and our universe with missions that look at questions such as whether Mars could have ever sustained small life forms.
Their work leads to innovations that significantly impact people’s daily lives.
Here are interviews with a few of the faces in our community who make the nation’s space travel program possible, talking about everything from the history of NASA with Tom Gavin, who’s been with the unmanned space program since the time of the Apollo missions, to Dennis Young, who was integral in the planning and preparation for missions such as the Curiosity rover.
Over the past few months, a few of these Santa Clarita Valley residents came down to KHTS AM-1220 studios to discuss their work and experiences with space exploration.
Dennis Young, lead resource analyst, JPL
As a child, Young dreamed of space exploration. He would drive by JPL everyday on his way to work at Lockheed, before he began working at the lab 11 years ago.
While in the studio, he discussed one of the biggest challenges of his JPL career: the landing of a space exploration vehicle on Mars.
The rover’s actual Mars landing on was all dependent upon preplanned data and analyses, there weren’t any “nerds on joysticks,” Young joked during an interview on George Cummings’ KHTS AM-1220 morning show Monday.
“We had to program everything in advance,” Young said, because the light years’ of distance between the two planets.
When the Rover was ready to land Aug. 5, 2012 — a date he’ll not soon forget — he sat with bated breath at home around 10:30 p.m. as the Martian exploration vehicle prepared to land.
Even with the most advanced computer systems in the world, there’s still the “seven minutes of terror,” in which engineers, technicians and officials must, wait, pray and hope their years of planning pay off during the actual landing.
“It’s all pre-programmed at that point,” Young said, explaining a video with the end of the rocket-propelled phase of the Rover mission as it separates and prepares to land on Mars via parachute.
“I will go to my grave and that’s something I will remember very clearly,” Young said. “As I was watching NASA tv… and I realized as they said, ‘We’re entering the earth’s atmosphere,’ that it’s already happened,” he said. “So it was either a hunk of junk on the surface of another planet, or an incredible success in robotic space exploration.”
Young also has strong Santa Clarita Valley ties however, living out here with two children who attend Santa Clarita Elementary.
Jennifer Trosper, deputy project manager for Curiosity Rover
Trosper first came to the Santa Clarita Valley 15 years ago with her husband, who is a military service member stationed at Edwards Air Force base.
When the Curiosity rover first landed on Mars several years ago, a new technology called a sky crane was used instead of the traditional air bag system.
“Basically it was like a helicopter that placed (the rover) carefully on the ground. It was extremely exciting to see,” she said. “It was the first step in some of the new technologies we need to land people on Mars eventually.”
The rover landed in a crater and has been driving toward a mountain that appears to have built up in the crater’s center, she said.
“A mountain that built up over time is basically like a history book of the geology of the surface of Mars. The rover is like our eyes and hands and feet that goes to read this history book that we see there on the surface of Mars.”
Curiosity arrived at the mountain, which has been named Mount Sharp, approximately one month ago and is currently investigating its foothills.
“Prior to that we actually met the mission criteria: to find out if Mars had ever been habitable,” Trosper said. “Many billions of years ago, (microorganisms) could have lived on the surface of Mars, so now we’re trying to figure out where the best places to preserve that information would be.”
Tracy Drain, flight systems engineer
Growing up Drain enjoyed watching television shows with her mom as she was a big fan of “Star Trek” and “Battlestar Galactica” as she believes it influenced her about the future of space travel.
“I always thought it was amazing that scientists can look around for clues that they can see around today and figure out what must have happened,” Drain said. “It wasn’t until high school when I started thinking about what was I going to do and where I was going to school and for me it was interesting because no one that I knew went to college.”
When Drain was a child she lived with her grandparents, and her mom worked for McDonald’s, and she shared how her mother was always supportive in her decisions.
Drain earned a scholarship to go to college and found out how her mom was relieved as “she had no idea how she was going to make it happen.”
Born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, where she graduated from Waggener High School in 1993. She attended the University of Kentucky to pursue a bachelor of science degree in Mechanical Engineering. While at the university, she worked at the NASA Langley Research Center Virginia. After graduating in 1998, she went to the Georgia Institute of Technology where she received her Master’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering in May 2000.
Drain and her husband moved to the Santa Clarita Valley around 2003 after searching to buy a home. One of her favorite buildings in the area is the public library where she enjoys reading books in her spare time.
When asked what kind of advice she’d give to young kids interested in pursuing the same field, she shared, “I have two things for kids who are interested in working as an engineer or scientist at a place like JPL or other NASA centers. The key thing is really to think critically,” Drain said. “and learning outside the box.”
From everything to how a controversial Cuban plot spurred the nation’s moon landing to how our space program went from slide rulers to wireless computers, Santa Clarita resident Tom Gavin has pretty much seen it all in his five-plus decades with JPL.
Gavin remembers being one of the earliest residents of the Sky Blue housing tract in the Santa Clarita Valley, where he and his wife and young family purchased a $22,000 home in 1967. The rent with an option to buy meant his first year’s rent went toward the down payment.
The “city of Santa Clarita” was about two decades away, and the Newhalls were in the midst of an unsuccessful bid to name the area Valencia Valley.
And the technology was vastly different, as well.
“There were no hand calculators,” Gavin said. “The spacecraft computers were fixed wired — a lot different than it is today.”
Gavin works as a consultant for JPL, using his experience as “one of the graybeards” to advise on development. Gavin joined Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Nov. 19, 1962.
He also takes part in roundtable discussions on spacecraft matters as an adviser to the National Science and Technology Council.
