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As President of PSS, Mr. Paluszek is responsible for company management. He is working with Dr. Samuel Cohen of PPPL on a nuclear fusion reactor for space propulsion and terrestrial power generation. He is also leading a project to develop a Track Oriented Multiple Hypothesis Testing Toolbox for object tracking for the automotive and aerospace industries.
He developed a new optical navigation sensor for geosynchronous and deep space spacecraft.He designed Space Rapid Transit, a two stage to orbit Launch Vehicle project which employs horizontal take-off and landing and uses an aircraft first stage combined cycle engine. He designed the Attitude Control System and ACS flight software for the OSC Indostar-1 satellite, which has been flying since 1997 and led the effort to develop the TDRS momentum management system for Hughes. Mr. Paluszek has developed commercial software products including the Spacecraft Control Toolbox, used worldwide for spacecraft simulation, analysis and control system design.
Prior to founding PSS in 1992, Mr. Paluszek was an engineer at GE Astro Space in East Windsor NJ. At GE, he designed the GGS Polar despun platform control system and led the design of the GPS IIR attitude control system and the Inmarsat-3 attitude control systems. The GGS Polar despun platform controller included active stabilization of the four deployed wire antennas using the despun platform motor. This was the one of the first applications of active vibration control on a satellite at GE. He also managed the ACS analysis unit and was lead attitude analysis on over a dozen satellite launches and shift supervisor, with responsibility for all subsystems, on one launch. This included flying over 100 satellite maneuvers.
As Vice President of PSS, Ms. Thomas helps manage the company in addition to performing and managing technical work on our government and consulting contracts. She has recently been selected to be a 2016 NASA NIAC fellow for the study, "Fusion-Enabled Pluto Orbiter and Lander", collaborating with PPPL.
Ms. Thomas has been the PI for numerous Air Force and NASA SBIRs ranging from solar sails to proximity satellite operations. As a senior engineer she has led consulting work on precision CubeSat attitude control systems and propellantless solar sail control systems for customer including NASA and ESA. She manages the commercial MATLAB toolbox product lines for PSS and developed the Solar Sail Module for high-fidelity simulation of sailcraft control systems. She has developed collision monitoring tools for the safe guidance mode of the Swedish Space Corporation's PRISMA mission and TechSat 21.
Prior to joining the technical staff full-time in February of 2001, Ms. Thomas worked at PSS in a series of internships since 1996. She has worked on a variety of software, including: artificial intelligence and decision support tools, an interplanetary orbit propagation toolbox, Java web services, and a multibody simulation of the TDRS spacecraft for momentum management verification. She is experienced in MATLAB, C++, and Java technical programming.
As a Master's student at MIT, Ms. Thomas worked on the design of a Shuttle flight experiment to study the plumes of a Hall and a pulsed plasma thruster, known as ETEEV (Electric Thruster Environmental Effects Verification). This effort included experimental work in MIT's new vacuum facility. The design studies included analysis of a number of plasma diagnostics. While a student Ms. Thomas participated in NASA Academy, a summer leaderhip intensive program, at NASA/GSFC.
Dr. Pajer is the Senior Scientist at Princeton Satellite Systems. He is also Adjunct Professor of Physics at Rider University in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, and also at The College of New Jersey in Ewing. Prior to joining PSS in 2010, Dr. Pajer was on the full time faculty of Rider University, and before that he was a member of the technical staff at Sarnoff Corporation in Princeton, New Jersey in their photonic integrated circuits group. His expertise is in the physics and application of optical devices. He has design and fabrication experience in discrete and continuous dynode vacuum tube photodetectors (single channel and imaging devices), plastic optical fibers, InP based photonic devices including laser sources, with applications in fields including oil well logging, aerospace, and medicine. Hardware that he had a hand in designing and building can be found in the Cassini, SOHO, and Defense Meteorological Satellite Program spacecraft, and in threat detection systems for fighter aircraft. He has also planned and outfitted several optical laboratories in the course of his career, and has built laboratory software suites in MATLAB and Python. He holds a patent for fundamental improvements made to a photonic spectroscopic device. At PSS Dr. Pajer contributes to the Integrated Communications and Optical Navigation System (ICONS™), the Satellite Planner for Execution and Reconfiguration (SPEAR™), and the Modular Fusion Engine, among others.