Richard DeLombard
NASA Glenn Research Center
Electrical Engineer

Who I am ...

I am a second generation NASA electrical engineer--my father started working for NASA in the early years. Currently I work as a project manager (or team leader) with a small group of engineers who analyze the vibration conditions of the International Space Station (ISS). The information about how much the ISS shakes is important to scientists whose experiments are being operated on the ISS because too much vibration can affect their experiments.

Where I came from ...

I grew up in a small town west of Cleveland, Ohio, and NASA was an important part of my life. I didn't aim for a career at NASA when I was young, but my interests in college led me toward NASA.

How I got to NASA ...

My graduate school advisor had solar energy projects for his graduate students. I chose a project on photovoltaics, "solar cells" that convert light energy to electrical energy. (Solar cells are found in calculators and many other electronic devices.) When I graduated from college, I found that NASA needed engineers for photovoltaic tests.

My work here at NASA ...

My first job here at NASA was testing equipment for solar energy projects. I enjoyed working with a large "field" (about the size of a football field) of solar cells. Later I joined a group of engineers who design and install photovoltaic projects and continued that work for eight years.

The photovoltaic projects we designed and installed were for remote areas with no available electricity. During this time, I traveled to two countries in South America and five countries in Africa, as well as Indonesia, Thailand, and India. One project provided electricity to five small, remote medical clinics in South America and Africa. It was thrilling to provide lights, radios, and especially vaccine refrigerators to the clinics and the people they served. Other projects we designed ranged from small systems to pump water to large systems for entire villages.

My next job was helping to design the International Space Station (ISS). I was one of hundreds of engineers working on the design and plans for creating the largest satellite ever to be put in orbit. After only three years on the ISS project, I switched to the area of microgravity science.

My work in microgravity ...

Microgravity is the condition in which the effects of gravity are so minimized that it seems that there is no gravity. This occurs in free fall, whether it's a baseball thrown from an outfielder to the catcher or the ISS orbiting the Earth. The reduced gravity conditions of free fall allow science experiments to be conducted without the disturbing effects of gravity, such as convection (fluid motion caused by gravity) and sedimentation (the process of depositing finely divided solid material to the bottom of a liquid). Our projects include designing and building instruments that measure the extremely low levels of acceleration caused by vibrations on the ISS and analyzing the data. Our instruments have:

• flown on more than twenty Shuttle missions,
• spent over three years on Russia's Mir space station, and
• been housed on the ISS for over three years.

What else I do ...

I am a private pilot (taught by my father), I love to travel, and I enjoy long-distance bicycle rides. Every year I visit my local middle school and talk with each of the fifth grade science classes about microgravity science, the Shuttle, and the ISS. I enjoy working on the high school student team competition called Dropping In a Microgravity Environment (DIME). The selected teams each year win a three-day trip to NASA Glenn to operate their experiment in our drop tower.
http://microgravity.grc.nasa.gov/DIME.html

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