AE alumni share in New Horizons’ success

On July 14, 2015, the Earth was gifted with beautiful photos and plenty of data from the dwarf planet, Pluto, billions of miles away. That day – culminating over a decade of scientific work into great achievement – New Horizons became the first spacecraft to fly by Pluto, gaining detailed measurements and observations of the planet and its moons.

Aerospace Engineering at Illinois alumni Gabe Rogers, Stewart Bushman and Coralie Jackman all played key roles in the mission and its success. As New Horizons’ Spacecraft Systems Engineer and Guidance and Control Lead, Rogers, BS 95, MS 97, has been with the mission since its inception in 2001. Rogers works at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory with Bushman, MS 99, who has served as Propulsion Lead Engineer for New Horizons since 2005. Jackman, BS 11, dove into New Horizons right after graduating from Illinois. As the Lead Optical Navigation (OpNav) Engineer for the Space Navigation and Flight Dynamics Practice at KinetX, Inc., Jackman is responsible for coordinating the OpNav team’s support analysis, development, planning and operations for New Horizons.

“The highlight for me was watching Pluto reveal its mysteries day-by-day, image-by-image,” Jackman said. “Over the last several years we had been simulating images of the Pluto system for various analyses and operational readiness tests, but it turned out to be far more astounding, beautiful, and complex than we ever could have imagined.”

Plenty of challenges went into building the mission.

“We only had around 4 years from the proposal acceptance from NASA to getting the mission designed, built, tested, and launched. That is a really short amount of time for such a large, complex mission,” Rogers said. “We put in a lot of hours over that timeframe, and made it to the launch window on time. 

“Since then it has just been an extended sprint, despite the 9.5-year flight time,” he continued. “We had to plan for an asteroid flyby in 2006, the Jupiter flyby in 2007, various science activities and rehearsals during the cruise phase, and conduct a 7-month science campaign in 2015. The spacecraft, by design, is performing unique observations for each of these that required a lot of planning and testing ahead of time. Also to save on cost we had a really small team, and each team member was not exclusively working New Horizons.”

The fly-by day, itself, went spectacularly.

“We were on console when the first signals came back after the closest approach, and everyone was holding their breath, even though we knew our little rock star of a spacecraft would be just fine, and there was the data in all greens (green good, red bad),” Bushman said. “From the propulsion perspective, everything has been practically clockwork since launch. (Principal Investigator) Alan Stern eventually took to calling me the Maytag Man.”

While the mission has significantly impacted the careers of all the alumni, Rogers has been particularly invested.

“It has pretty much been my career, being it has been such a long mission. I started working New Horizons four years out of college, and plan to work on it until we turn the lights out in the control center,” he said. “It has afforded me the opportunity to grow as an engineer, as I have taken the lessons learned and applied them to other missions.”

Each of the alumni awarded credit for the lessons they had learned while AE students, as well as to the faculty who had taught them, including Profs. Vicki Coverstone, Sri Namachchivaya, Associate Prof. Soon-Jo Chung, and Emeriti Profs. Bruce Conway, Wayne Solomon, John Prussing and Rod Burton.

They also each had advice to offer current students:

“Branch out! Get active in the awesome student organizations in the department. It’s never too early to start networking, going to conferences and on student trips,” believes Jackman.

Said Rogers, “Find a niche that you really like and aggressively pursue it. Interesting work follows hard work, by which I mean that the really interesting projects (e.g New Horizons) are given to those who work hard at the seemingly boring projects (e.g testing flight software for sub-orbital launch vehicles).”

And, offered Bushman, “Once you’re out working you’ll find that the aerospace field is pretty small. Remember your older classmates and TAs; they may be in the position to help you get hired someday.”