ALTEN Technology - WHISKEY TASTING, BBQ, NETWORKING & PRESENTATION

SOLD OUT - Join AIAA Rocky Mountain Section for our summer speaker series event of whiskey tasting and BBQ, hosted by ALTEN Technology in Westminster CO. ALTEN is supporting Honeybee Robotics on a Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL) mission to a richly organic world, Titan. Advancing our search for the building blocks of life, the Dragonfly mission will fly to multiple sites to sample and examine complex organics around Saturn's icy moon. This will be done utilizing a dual-quadcopter carrying onboard scientific instruments to analyze organic material acquired from the surface. 

ALTEN Technology is responsible for developing the avionics to orchestrate and automate the sample acquisition process, as well as flight software and telemetry, which communicate directly with the rover on a 160-minute radio cycle.

Speaker Bios:

• Nate Slinker – Project Manager

Nate has 10+ years working in highly regulated industries between medical, automotive, and aerospace. He received his degree in Mechanical Engineering and an MBA from Purdue University. His background is in mechanical design, product testing, and verification / validation. He has supported several aerospace programs, including developing hardware for the MDL ratio platform and is currently leading the ALTEN Technology effort in support of Honeybee Robotics and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) for DrACO’s Avionics sub-system and Flight Software.

• John Maushammer - Staff Software Engineer

John's background is in embedded systems, designing both hardware and software, primarily in regulated industries. Starting in the mid-1980s, he helped develop CPU boards, a mobile ground station, and an antenna pointing system for Orbital Sciences Corp's (OSC) line of small satellites. He stepped away from the industry to design EDA CAD tools, an augmented reality system for aviation, and a protein analysis machine. John got back into aerospace after joining ALTEN Technology in 2020, and now leading the DrACO Flight Software project for Honeybee Robotics, and is more recently supporting phased-array antennas for space applications.

• Thad Briese - Director of Electrical Engineering

After receiving his degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Nebraska, Thad has spent 20+ years working in highly regulated industries and contract engineering. He has primarily focused on digital design, including FPGA development, and has led projects to develop a COTs star tracker, as well as two FPGA programs for NASA's SLS program. Thad has led the ALTEN Electrical Engineering department for two years, after working in the group for the previous four.

ALTEN Technology USA is an engineering services company that provides solutions for engineering, technology, and product development. For decades, we’ve been helping our clients develop and refine products that are changing the world, whether that’s by shaping the future of space exploration, saving lives with medical devices that set a new standard of care, or creating the fully autonomous electric taxi of tomorrow.

Our US-based team of more than 1,000 engineers works across industries including aerospace and defense, medtech and life sciences, robotics and uncrewed systems, automotive, commercial vehicles, electric vehicles, energy and environment, and rail. We support a variety of engagement models, including onsite embedded support at our clients’ facilities and outsourced work packages executed in our engineering delivery centers. We have offices located throughout the US, with our aerospace engineering headquarters in Westminster, CO.

The ALTEN Group, our parent company, is a French multinational engineering and IT consulting company founded in 1988. It operates in 30 countries across Europe, North America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East and has more than 58,300 employees worldwide. The ALTEN Group covers the whole development cycle and offers a choice of service levels, from technology consulting to complete project outsourcing.