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Greg Levanas

Address:

4800 Oak Grove Drive
M/S 107-
Pasadena, CA 91109

Phone:

818.354.6528

Fax:

818.354.8172
FORMER MEMBER

Greg Levanas

Member of Technical Staff

Biography

Started my career at JPL on March 1979 as an electronic technician. Started my first job working as a test tech on the first generation CCD cameras used on Galileo. Eventually worked up to a design engineer both analog and digital also on the Galileo came ra. From this I went on to work as a lead test engineer on the Galileo Computer Data System, then as a Mechanical Engineer designing a Rover Deploy mechanism for MUSES, then served as Flight System manager for MUSES involving muli disciplins such as
com m unications,software,electronics,systems and mechanical. From this I moved on to research and development task lead for Sub Surface Explorer, Solar Sail, Nanorover Outpost. My current job is Electronic Engineer Team Lead for a Large Temperature Range ti ghtly packaged general Motor Controller originally aimed for use on MSL.iu

Education

1970 - 1975 Graduate Costa Mesa High School
1975 - 1985 Orange Coast College. I do not have a college degree. I am self learned and have been self taught with some mentoring in the area of Electronic Design, Mechanical Design, Thermal Design and System Design. I believe that my technical leadership involving teams with college education has demonstrated the effectiveness of my self learning.fm

Professional Experience

Management:/ - Over 16 years experience.
Leadership - Motor Control Electronics Technical Task Manager (~5 engineers, 2yr) responsible for team leadership and analog design of a brushless motor control electronics designed to work over a 300C temperature extreme.
- Miniature Smart Camera Technical Task Manager (~3 engineers, 1yr) responsible for the development and design of a miniature camera system employing a DSP and FPGA for On Board data processing.
- Flight System Manager (>15 engineers, 1yr) responsible for the technical and schedule performance of the NASA MUSES-CN Rover (mission to an asteroid) high technology system.
- Robotic Devices Task Manager (>5 engineers, 1yr) responsible for managing four technology demonstration projects (Sola r Sail, Deep Drill,
Gas Pipe Explorer and Nano Rover Outpost).
- Failure Analysis Team Lead (>5 engineers, 2 yr ) responsible for the organization and leading of a team with the purpose of understanding and developing an in flight work around for a t a pe recorder failure which occurred on the NASA Galileo spacecraft (mission to Jupiter).
- Flight Software Test Equipment Lead Engineer (~5 engineers, 2yrs) responsible for the design and build of a hardware/software system which would enable testin g o f complex software needed for a re-engineering effort on the NASA Galileo spacecraft in response to a high gain antenna failure.
- Flight Computer Group Hardware Test lead (~5 engineers, 7yrs) responsible for the test and hardware i n teg ration of the flight computer systems used for both the NASA Galileo (mission to Jupiter) and the NASA Magellan (mission to Venus) interplanetary spacecraft missions.

Design: - Over 15 years experience.
(Electronic) - Design of a extreme temperatu re RAD hard motor control electronics using 350K ASIC, RAD hard MOSFETS and discrete analog electronics for sensing transducers and motor sensors.
- Design of a miniature camera system with On Board data processing using a DSP with a Xilinx Virtex 11 cap ab le of high speed video processing
- System design and development of a VME based data bus simulation system using three Xilinx gate arrays, 74LS logic integrated with a VME Radysis computer running DOS / Microsoft C.
- System design and developm ent of a MAC based telemetry analysis system running Labview capable of analysis of Reed Solomon
error correction codes, convolution codes, Integer Cosine Transforms,
Bus Adaptive Rice Compression codes ("BARC"), CCDS telemetry packet decoding.
- Lin ear Pow er Supply design of a 28volt 1/2amp 50mv ripple power supply and Logic design re-engineering of a block adaptive Rice Data Compressor (increasing operating design margin from ~1% to 30%) used in the NASA Galileo spacecraft (mission to Jupit er) ca mera sys tem.
- Logic design modification of a flight computer system (improving fault tolerance) used in the NASA Galileo spacecraft .
Design - Cont. - Electronic high speed parallel data bus design used in the NASA CASSINI spacecraft (mission t o Saturn).
- Fre quency Modulated RF transmitter design utilizing a novel odd harmonic full bridge rectifier multiplier design published in RF Feature Technology.

Design: - Over 4 years experience.
(Mechanical) - Design a six legged rover mobility sys tem with a 100lb p ayload capability
to be used as a platform for telescope arrays. Design focused on a low stowage envelope and large payload to mass ratio.
- Design of a low mass and high vibration environment restraint and release mechanism used to deliver a 1.3Kgram rover to the surface of an asteroid.
- Design of a restraining pin friction measuring system to allow troubleshooting of the antenna failure that occurred on the NASA Galileo spacecraft.
- Design of a vibration and thermal vacuum t es t fixtur e u sed for environmental testing of the computer system used in the NASA Galileo spacecraft (mission to Jupiter).

Design: - Over 3 years experience.
(Thermal) - Design of a passive thermal control system based on radiative heat transfer and p h ase chan ge heat capa citance used for the NASA MUSES-CN Rover (mission to an asteroid).

Test: - Over 25 years experience.
- Authored over 100 test procedures and carried out testing for the flight computer systems used on both the NASA Galileo (miss ion to Jupi ter) and Mage llan (mission to venus) spacecraft projects.
- Designed in-flight test used on the NASA Galileo spacecraft for anomaly investigations (antenna, slip rings and tape recorder).
- Evaluated and troubleshoot atomic clock based OMEGA radio dopp ler navigation avionics.

Analysis: - Over 15 years experience.
- Analog closed loop stability analysis for a charge couple detector thermal control system used in the NASA Galileo spacecraft camera involving gain / phase plots (Bode pl ots) an d transient res ponse (Laplace transforms).
- Analog closed loop stability and transient analysis for the analog systems including power regulators, detector amplifiers, motor position comparitors and sensor amplifiers used in the NASA MUSES-CN r over (mi ssion to an aste roid).
- Analog worst case and stress analysis for a sample and hold signal chain used as the signal chain for the NASA Galileo spacecraft camera.
- Logic timing margin and stress analysis for a block adaptive Rice data comp resso r an d Reed Solo mon en coder used to process the imaging detector information for the NASA Galileo spacecraft camera.
- Laser drive efficiency analysis over wide temperature ranges (-180C to +125C).
Analysis - Cont. - Thermal design analysis of the rov er pa ssive thermal contr ol system for the NASA MUSES-CN (mission to an asteroid) utilizing an electronic analysis tool to model both conductive and radiative heat transfer.
- Analytically developed LOGIC Design test margin criteria (frequency, voltage, temp erature) to enable operating m argin evaluation for the NASA Galileo spacecraft camera digital system.
- Mechanical equations of motion analysis for a percussion hammer taking into account static and dynamic frictions utilizing Mathcad.
- M echanic al stre ss analysis for the low mass restraint and release mechanism used for the NASA MUSES-CN (mission to an asteroid) rover system.
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Publications

2023
  1. D. Newill-Smith, J. Shatts, R. P. Dillon, J. Karras, A. Brinkman, S. Backus, A. Umali, R. McCormick, L. Fradet, J. Laramee, G. Levanas, and R. Fleischner, "Cold Operable Lunar Deployable Arm (COLDArm) System Development and Test," 2023 IEEE Aerospace Conference, Big Sky, MT, USA, pp. 1-19, doi: 10.1109/AERO55745.2023.10115649, 04 March 2023.