Joseph C Chavez

Employment

I am employed at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico as a Principal Member of the Technical Staff. At Sandia, I have participated in the design of many embedded processor systems for both ground and space applications. In two projects I found particularly interesting, I helped design scientific instruments for both the ISEE-3 (ICE) and the Ulysses spacecraft:

• ISEE-3 (International Sun-Earth Explorer), launched in 1978, monitored solar activity for several years from a region in space between the earth and the sun known as the L1 Lagrangian point. In 1982, its orbit was changed, it was renamed the International Cometary Explorer (ICE), and in 1985 it became the first spacecraft to encounter the tail of a comet.

• Ulysses was launched in 1990 aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery. It flew by Jupiter in 1992 and used the gravitational field of the giant planet to place it into a solar orbit outside the ecliptic plane. In 1994 and 1995, Ulysses became the first spacecraft to explore the region of space above the poles of the sun.

Lately, I have been writing software to extract useful information from masses of satellite data, and also software tools to permit easy modeling and analysis of spacecraft performance.

Education

I have a BSEE degree from the University of New Mexico , a MSEE degree from Stanford University, and a Masters degree in Computer Science from New Mexico Tech.

Home Projects

Osmond PCB is a flexible Macintosh application that allows anyone to easily design printed circuit boards. The code is substantially complete and is currently undergoing testing. For the adventurous, free trial versions are available for download.

gerber2pdf.py is a Python program that converts Gerber files (used to fabricate printed circuit boards) into a PDF document that can be viewed and printed with the freely available Acrobat viewer.

This link will take you to my son's web page where he gives help on video games.