NASA engineer is working on personal satellite assistant (09/05/99)

NASA engineer is working on personal satellite assistant

by Olena Welhasch

PARSIPANNY, N.J.: Imagine having a softball-sized personal assistant floating around your house or office and taking care of time-consuming tasks. NASA astronauts may soon have access to this luxury thanks to the work of Yuri Gawdiak and his NASA research team.

The Personal Satellite Assistant (PSA) is an astronaut support device designed to move and operate independently in the microgravity environment of space. The fan-propelled PSA will monitor the space station's environment, testing sensors, fans, communication control and navigation, and will even be able to make minor repairs, leaving the astronauts free to work on other matters. The PSA will be instrumental in measuring temperature, air pressure and gas levels. "Gases behave differently in space. They have a nonpredictable distribution, so the hard-wired sensors won't pick up a given gas. The PSA can hunt and search for gases," said Mr. Gawdiak.

Due to its size, the PSA will be able to investigate areas of the spacecraft that people cannot. This technology would have been useful when a fire broke out on the Mir space station, to ensure that the entire fire had been extinguished.

Equipped with a camera, microphone, speakers and display terminal, the PSA will enable the scientists on Earth to interact with crew members while providing a unique view of the mission operation. The on-board sensors may also be used to monitor the status of lab animals. Ideally, the apparatus will have plug-and-play capabilities, allowing the astronauts to outfit the PSA with particular tasks to complete that day.

The PSA concept was presented at a Silicon Valley conference on data fusion this summer. Today, the concept mock-up, which is about the size of a basketball, floats over a table on Earth. The challenges facing the design team includes decreasing the size of the PSA while maintaining enough power to keep it functioning and creating sensors sensitive enough to prevent it from bumping into objects on board. According to a recent article in New Scientist, NASA scientists predict that it will be about two years before the PSA is ready for the space shuttle or international space station.

Yuri Gawdiak, 36, orginally of Silver Spring, Md., dreamed of working for NASA since he was a child. Today he does. Mr. Gawdiak is a team experiment lead engineer at NASA, Ames Research Center (ARC) in California.

In addition to the PSA project, Mr. Gawdiak was involved in the successful Mir Wireless Network Experiment (WNE), which was the first test of a wireless client-server network in the space environment. Mr. Gawdiak was also involved in a NASA (ARC) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) alliance formed to build a full mission-simulation facility that will be used to validate future airport surface and air traffic control tower technologies.

Mr. Gawdiak was an active member of Plast Youth Organization and was head of the Plast branch in Washington. As a youth he attended bandura camp and Ukrainian school. In his free time Mr. Gawdiak said he enjoys hiking, biking and skiing with his wife, Lada, and immediately added that he has fun at work, too. Mr. Gawdiak is a member of Ukrainian National Association Branch 15.

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