Thomas Wheeler

Mr. Wheeler had been with STScI for since 1992 in a variety of engineering roles. Prior to 1992, he worked on 20 plus different shuttle, sounding rocket, and high altitude balloon payloads and programs for the Air Force, DoD, and Department of Energy.

Engineering Team: October 1998 - Present

He is currently supporting COS and WFC3 instrument development in a similar capacity as in the Operations Development Team listed below. He also supported SM3-A, and SM3-B and emergency real-time operations. Since 1998 he has led, co-led, or participated in all instrument engineering/operations-related anomaly investigations. He has provided SI trending software, reviewed documents, and has performed several engineering related studies

Operations Development Team: September 1994 - October 1998

While offsite at Ball Aerospace, Boulder, CO., Mr. Wheeler participated in the fabrication and testing of three of the Hubble Space Telescope's instruments: the Near Infra-Red Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer, the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, and the Advanced Camera for Surveys. He monitored and consulted on operations related design changes to assure that the ground system and instrument operations were compatible, provided Ball Aerospace with feedback on the effects of their hardware design upon the ground system, watched for "show stoppers", and kept STScI informed. He promptly acquired missing instrument information needed for ground system developers at STScI by staying in close communication with Ball's hardware, software, and testing engineers, managers, and technicians. He obtained and sent science and engineering data from system testing and calibration activities required for checking the ground system operation.

Mr. Wheeler developed procedures, test scenarios, and instrument test instructions required to acquire instrument-timing data while gaining hands-on operations experience. These data were processed into reports and tables that were used by the FSET (Flight Systems Engineering Team) at STScI for efficient science instrument commanding.

He also enhanced the discrete Fourier series mechanism position correction algorithm for ACS and WFC3.

Faint Object Spectrograph Instrument Engineer: November 1992 - September 1994

He performed routine monthly instrument performance trending and analysis; troubleshot and resolved instrument anomalies. He submitted FOS engineering proposals (test procedures) for on-orbit calibration of detector discriminators and HV digicon focus and made recommendations to the FOS Science Team.