U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) engineer, Ivan Galysh, has been honored with the 2013
National Association of Rocketry (NAR) Howard Galloway Spacemodeling Service Award for contributions over the last decade focused on educating and motivating students in the technical disciplines of aerospace engineering.
As a mentor and organizer for student teams in the NAR's Team America Rocketry Challenge and NASA's Student Launch Initiative national programs, Galysh has spent hundreds of hours each year providing direct hands-on instruction, supervision, and motivation to multiple teams of students in grades seven through 12.
Galysh is recognized by NAR's highest award for the development of novice student rocketeers into confident mission teams, designing sophisticated payloads and high-power rockets and presenting their work for review by a panel of NASA engineers.
Founder of a
Federation of Galaxy Explorers program at Virginia's Chantilly High School, Galysh organizes and runs an annual summer camp teaching students to design, build, and fly instrument payloads for rockets. He also organizes and runs the
CanSat Competition—a competition created to provide a unique opportunity for teams to design and build a satellite that fits inside a soda can. Held annually in Texas, the CanSat rocket launch involves student teams from around the world and is sponsored by aerospace industries, associations, and NRL.
Galysh is also founder of the national
Battle of the Rockets competition developed for high school and university student teams that involves the design and launch of rover-type payloads on large rockets.
In acknowledgement of these outstanding accomplishments, the NAR says, there is no other individual in the National Association of Rocketry who is more involved across more programs in advancing our organizational goal of 'paying forward' to motivate and educate the next generation of U.S. aerospace professionals and rocketeers.
Joining the laboratory's Space Applications Branch in 1987, Galysh started his NRL career developing systems to test the performance of atomic frequency standards for GPS satellites. This led to the development of two-way satellite time transfer systems that can measure time differences between atomic clocks across the country to less than a nanosecond through a geosynchronous satellite.
As his career has progressed, Galysh has aided the laboratory's Plasma Physics Division and the Space Systems Development Department with the development of space-based experiments such as the Scintillation and Tomography Receiver in Space (CITRIS), launched in 2007 to measure the total electron content of the ionosphere, and the design of electronics for the series of Atmospheric Neutral Density Experiments (ANDE) satellites, ANDE launched in 2006 and ANDE-2 launched in 2009.
Galysh designed and built the Digital Imaging Star Camera (DISC) payload installed on-orbit the International Space Station (ISS) in 2011, which operated as an experimental low cost star tracker before being decommissioned in 2013. He continues to work with the Space Science Division developing payloads destined for the International Space Stations (ISS).
In August 2013, three payloads (GLADIS, MARS, and SWATS) developed by Galysh's team were installed on-orbit the ISS. The mission, known as Space Test Program-Houston 4 (STP-H4), allows the trio of space science experiments to demonstrate miniaturized satellite technologies for improved maritime security and measurement of space weather and the radiation environment.
At present, Galysh is working to support experiment integration for STP-H5 and on SpinSat—designed to demonstrate and characterize the on-orbit performance of electrically controlled solid propellant technology in space.