Who is DrChip?


	Charles E. Campbell
	(Chip Campbell)

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 did well at school and played soccer (that's football for you Euro types). They all play piano and at least one other instrument.

J plays tuba and bass guitar; he's graduated from University of Maryland and Reservoir HS (which won the State Championship in soccer with J playing stopper); he majored in kinesiology. He was a physical trainer and is now holds a doctorate physical therapy which he got from Methodist University in North Carolina.
C plays saxophone, clarinet, and electric guitar; has graduated from Howard Community College, and has been a ranger at Philmont, New Mexico. He attended St Marys College in Maryland and got his bachelor's degree in philosophy.
L played trumpet, graduated from University of Maryland, and has graduated from nursing school at UMd at Baltimore. She is now working as a nurse - I'd say where but she's a travel nurse and so works all over.
N played clarinet, went to Virginia Tech, graduated from Emory University with a Masters of Public Health, and graduated from the University of Florida in nursing. She worked with the Peace Corps in Guatemala.
My wife works as a magnetic resonance imaging technician.
I myself retired from Goddard Space Flight Center as an engineer; I occasionally taught at Catholic University (Unix Systems Programming and Analysis of Algorithms).

I graduated from Springbrook High School, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (VPI&SU), Princeton University, and Purdue University. I hold a doctorate from Purdue University in robotics, and am currently working on the Magnetospheric Multiscale mission 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 towards) 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):

I also worked on MMS (Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission) which involved four satellites, in formation, measuring the magnetic fields about the Earth. Aside from testing, my part involved simulating the four satellites and some of their controls using FreeSpace. I mostly worked on a portion of Freespace (the matlab-like frontend).

Contact

My email is: NcampObell@SdrchipP.AorgM. Take out the NOSPAM embedded therein and it'll work. Hate e-spam.

Last Modified Apr 11, 2023 12:01:53 PM