{"id":4680,"date":"2019-05-30T18:28:00","date_gmt":"2019-05-30T18:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/?p=4680"},"modified":"2023-05-24T17:56:13","modified_gmt":"2023-05-24T17:56:13","slug":"blue-streak","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/2019\/05\/30\/blue-streak\/","title":{"rendered":"Blue Streak"},"content":{"rendered":"

A FORMER WABASH PHYSICS MAJOR HAS BEEN DESIGNING, BUILDING, AND TESTING THE ROCKET ENGINES THAT WILL TAKE US TO NEW WORLDS, AND MAY EVEN SAVE OUR OWN.\u00a0<\/em><\/h3>\n
by Steve Charles
\nPhotos by Kim Johnson<\/h5>\n

The fastest rocket engine for deep space missions has no moving parts.<\/p>\n

As the ion thruster throttles through the solar system at speeds of up to 200,000 mph, there will be no white exhaust plume, but a blue streak of light.<\/p>\n

The solar-powered engine was developed by NASA not in the sunny space centers of Florida, California, or Texas, but in Cleveland.<\/p>\n

And the guy who designed and helped build, test, and prepare the ion thruster for its first mission also led the team that set the record with it for the longest continuous operation of a rocket engine. He\u2019s currently testing the most recent model for a NASA mission to protect the earth from asteroids.<\/p>\n

That guy is former Wabash physics major Mike Patterson \u201982 from Kendallville, Indiana.<\/p>\n


\nPatterson\u2019s earthly ride<\/strong> is more humble\u2014an older red Toyota Corolla. He picks us up at the main gate of NASA\u2019s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland wearing jeans, a dark-striped western shirt, and a bolo tie with a likeness of the \u201cEnd of the Trail\u201d warrior on horseback sculpture on it. There\u2019s a black cowboy hat in the Corolla\u2019s trunk as we load our camera equipment on this frigid late winter day. The cracked Wabash license plate frame clatters when he closes the lid.<\/p>\n

Patterson has spent most of February 2019 at The Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo, California, testing the latest ion thruster for DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test). A mission backed by NASA\u2019s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, it will launch in 2021 to test a method of changing an asteroid\u2019s course by slightly altering its speed. Wherever Patterson is working, government travel regulations require him to return to Glenn at least one day per month, and we\u2019ve lucked out\u2014today is the day.<\/p>\n

As we drive past the landmark hangar and wind tunnels toward his office and the Electric Propulsion Lab in Building 301, Patterson recalls his internship at Glenn in 1981 between his junior and senior years at Wabash. That\u2019s when he met Dave Byers, a leading expert on ion propulsion, who would become his mentor and who had worked with Harold Kaufman, builder of the first successful ion-propulsion engine.<\/p>\n

\u201cOn my first day I was working with some of the guys who worked for Dave, and within 10 minutes, I was running an ion thruster,\u201d says Patterson, his voice getting louder as he remembers the moment. \u201cThis guy told me, \u2018I\u2019m going for a coffee break\u2014you let me know what\u2019s going on.\u2019 There was a panel of analog meters and power supplies in front of me. Then another guy wandered by and said, \u2018Hmm, that doesn\u2019t look right.\u2019 I had no idea what I was doing, and I was a little overwhelmed the first few weeks.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut it was all cool. It was advanced propulsion, it was plasma physics, it was experimental-based, and it was, like, wow, an opportunity to work on the most advanced propulsion system in the known universe.\u201d<\/p>\n

When Patterson returned to Glenn for good in 1985, that same learn-by-experimentation philosophy prevailed.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe nice thing about working at NASA when I got here was this: You got in the lab, and if you weren\u2019t breaking something, they figured you weren\u2019t learning. So we were in there constantly, testing something, seeing how it worked, trying to improve it.\u201d<\/p>\n

DEEP SPACE 1
\n<\/strong>Patterson\u2019s office looks like he doesn\u2019t spend much time here. On top of one of the filing cabinets is an original ion thruster created by Kaufman in 1958, looking a lot like a stainless steel button accordion with a lot more holes. On the desk there\u2019s a key to Patterson\u2019s hometown of Kendallville, a souvenir from the day the mayor proclaimed \u201cMike Patterson Day.\u201d There are signed photographs from astronauts and a white board covered with equations. Awards and citations line the floor and every surface but his desk; there\u2019s no more room on the walls for the 11 patents he\u2019s been issued and the more than a dozen honors he has received.<\/p>\n

We notice some stones on his desk: \u201cMoon rocks?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo, sorry.\u201d He laughs. \u201cJust rocks. From my land in New Mexico. I love it out there.\u201d<\/p>\n

He leads us down a hallway that can\u2019t have changed since the 1970s and into the Electric Propulsion Lab. We enter one of the large vacuum chambers being prepped to test one of the NASA Evolutionary Xenon Thrusters (NEXT) for the DART mission. The record for longest continuous operation of a rocket engine (five years, six months) was set in one of these chambers. The NSTAR ion thrusters for the Dawn and Deep Space 1 missions were tested here.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of my success is due to luck and timing,\u201d Patterson insists. \u201cI came on in 1985 and it had been nearly a decade since NASA could hire anyone, so all the other guys were 15 to 20 years older than me. So they put me in charge and I went into a lab and banged away for a couple of years to get the [NSTAR] engine developed. I was fortunate to have Deep Space 1 come along and to be responsible for the thruster and its first real test in space.\u201d<\/p>\n

Deep Space 1 was the first NASA operational mission to use ion propulsion rather than the traditional chemical-powered rockets.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh man, we were scrambling to get it done and ready for that mission,\u201d Patterson recalls. \u201cFrom the time we finished the last iteration of the thruster to the time we flew was less than four years. That\u2019s lightning quick for the development of hardware and validation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Deep Space 1 was successfully launched into Earth orbit by a Delta II rocket on October 24, 1998, but there was a heart-stopping moment for Patterson as the spacecraft was slipping away from Earth and the ion engine was switched on to complete the flight.<\/p>\n

\u201cFour minutes after turning the engine on, we had a short, a glitch.\u201d Patterson says. \u201cI was pretty depressed. I saw my future vaporizing.<\/p>\n

\u201cA tiny piece of debris had caused the engine to go into recycle mode,\u201d Patterson explains, remembering the nervous hours he spent at his desk in Cleveland watching the engine readouts on the Internet. Controllers at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena took a conservative approach, spending weeks to shake off the metal debris.<\/p>\n

When they finally turned the engine back on, it worked perfectly. The spacecraft flew by an asteroid and took detailed photos of a comet, a triumph that set the stage for ion propulsion to be used in many of the most important missions in the near future.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf I had thought of it, I would have scratched my name on that one.\u201d\u2019 Patterson laughs.<\/p>\n

\u201cSO MUCH FARTHER TO GO\u201d
\n<\/strong>He drives us to Building 16, where a collection of ion thrusters provide a timeline for Glenn\u2019s\u2014and much of Patterson\u2019s\u2014work on ion propulsion. Patterson knows most of these engines well.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I like about this work is you come up with an idea, put it on a piece of paper, you get to build the hardware, you test it, and see it fly.\u201d<\/p>\n

A similar process drew him into rocketry as a boy in Kendallville.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the third grade I was spending all my time making elaborate drawings of Robert Goddard\u2019s first liquid fuel rocket and of Gemini and Mercury spacecraft,\u201d he recalls. \u201cSo my dad and I went downtown to the hobby store and bought a kit with a launchpad. The first rocket I built was an Estes Alpha III.\u201d<\/p>\n

They launched the rockets from his aunt\u2019s and uncle\u2019s land outside Kendallville. Eventually he upgraded to larger rockets, more powerful engines.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe didn\u2019t get many back.\u201d He smiles.<\/p>\n

I ask if he has any favorite moments from his 34 years at NASA. Having seen all the accolades in his office, I assume he has plenty to choose from.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not sure I have any,\u201d he says. \u201cI tend to think more often of my failures.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen a couple of guys and I got the government invention of the year award for the system that controls the charging on the international space station\u2014well, they say that saved the space station, so we did something from concept to flight that was critical on a human spacecraft. That was a good moment.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut some of this technology has gone through such a protracted gestation period that it\u2019s almost embarrassing. Our young guys are working on applications of technology that some guy designed before them, but they should be the ones working in the lab and coming up with the new technology, getting the opportunity that I got. A lot of what we\u2019re doing is polishing old hardware, when we should really be pushing the limits.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur customers shouldn\u2019t be telling us what they need; we should be telling them what we can do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Patterson speaks hopefully even as he describes his frustration.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re still in the biplane stage of this technology\u2014there\u2019s so much farther to go.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then he stops at an unfinished thruster\u2014essentially a deep bowl with a large center post, unlike anything else in the room\u2014and smiles.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is the annular concept,\u201d he explains. \u201cWhen people think of ion propulsion, they think of the tortoise and the hare, with ion propulsion being the tortoise,\u201d he explains. \u201cIt has low thrust but a long life span, so over time builds up great speed. But that limits its applications.\u201d<\/p>\n

The annular concept turns that on its head: more powerful thrust, shorter life span.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe could be using ion thrusters in ways that they have never been used before,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

A half-hour later<\/strong> we\u2019re at the NASA gift store checking out souvenirs, discussing the oddities of bureaucracies and government travel regulations. Like the speed of the ion thrusters he builds, a conversation with Patterson slowly builds in intensity. The crescendo to this one comes from out of the blue.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know, you asked about favorite moments,\u201d he says. \u201cNot long ago I was reading about something way outside the envelope that the Department of Defense wanted. I couldn\u2019t help thinking, How would I do that? How would I build something that performs like what they\u2019re asking for? And at first I\u2019m thinking, That\u2019s impossible, then, Ah, maybe, and I started sketching stuff out. That\u2019s when I came up with the annular concept.<\/p>\n

\u201cI told my old boss, Dave Byers, about it, and he thought it was great. I talked about it with John Foster, one of the guys who used to work here. The longer we look at it, the better it gets. We\u2019re going to go out to Aerospace and test it sometime soon.<\/p>\n

\u201cConceiving something, building the hardware, testing it, then seeing it fly\u2014that keeps me in this. Those are the moments\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A FORMER WABASH PHYSICS MAJOR HAS BEEN DESIGNING, BUILDING, AND TESTING THE ROCKET ENGINES THAT WILL TAKE US TO NEW WORLDS, AND MAY EVEN SAVE OUR OWN.\u00a0 by Steve Charles Photos by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":4683,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-gallery","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-class-notes","post_format-post-format-gallery"],"w_featured_image_url":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2019\/05\/0b8a3272-1-1024x683.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4680"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4680\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4692,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4680\/revisions\/4692"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}