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From Kendall County to Mars : News : Oswego Ledger-Sentinel : Hometown Newspaper for Oswego and Montgomery, IllinoisFrom Kendall County to Mars
| '62 OHS grad's career at famed NASA Lab started with a homemade telescope
| by Nancy Atkinson
| 12/4/2003
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The 1960’s were turbulent times, marked by the Vietnam War, political assassinations, and civil rights protests. But that turmoil was countered by NASA’s pioneering quest to explore our universe. The achievements and discoveries of that time and the subsequent development of technology have forever changed our world and how we see ourselves. While Mission Control in Houston was sending astronauts to the moon, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California was launching innovative spacecraft to investigate the planets of our solar system. Among the engineers and scientists at JPL who were figuring out how to do things that had never been done before was 1962 Oswego High School graduate, Neil Mottinger.
Mottinger grew up on a 200-acre farm midway between Yorkville and Plainfield, south of Ill. Route 126. His father, Clark, farmed and raised chickens and his mother, Ruth, taught at the elementary school in Plainfield. As a youngster, Mottinger attended a country school, and then in fourth grade, started going to Oswego. He enjoyed academics and played in the band, but lived 10 miles away from school with an hour bus ride each way. That, coupled with helping his parents and sister grade, candle and pack more than 2,000 eggs every evening kept him from being active in many school activities.
He remembers being in the senior class play, “January Thaw,” and was part of the minstrel shows put on by the music department, doing skits and jokes, including some one-liners about his physics and chemistry teacher, Charles Potts.
It seems as though Ruth Mottinger conspired with members of the community to ignite and fuel her son’s interest in astronomy. Mottinger recalls that his mother brought him to visit another teacher whose son had built a telescope. Mottinger was fascinated and decided to build one of his own.
“For $28.05 I bought a 4-inch mirror, a mount and an eyepiece. I went to a furniture store in Joliet and got a cardboard tube, raided my dad’s shop for some pipe, evetrough, and used some cultivator clamps and other things and put together what I would now call an atrocious mount,” Mottinger remembers. “I had no clock drive and no finder, so I had to squint through the tube to try to find anything in the telescope.”
Despite its crudeness, Mottinger’s first telescope holds some great memories.
“I’ll never forget the first time I saw Jupiter and its satellites (moons). I camped out in the yard in a tent, and about 4 o’clock in the morning I set up the telescope and pointed it toward Jupiter, and holy mackerel, there they were! I couldn’t believe it,” he recalled.
Then Mrs. Mottinger called up the father of one of her students who had a more sophisticated telescope.
“She got bold and basically invited herself over so we could see his telescope,” Mottinger laughed. “He had a 10-inch telescope with a clock drive in his backyard that would just make you drool.”
That was I. E. “Ole” Olson, the creator of the Ash Dome, who started an observatory dome manufacturing company in Plainfield because of that same backyard telescope. He constructed coverings for telescopes from grain silo tops. Ash Manufacturing still builds domes for amateur astronomers, as well as domes for observatories around the world, including six at Mt. Wilson Observatory, located about 10 miles from Mottinger’s current office at JPL.
“Mr. Olson knew a lot of people at the Adler Planetarium. My mother and I went there one time and mentioned his name and people jumped out of the woodwork to do a guided tour for us,”
Mottinger said. Mottinger also got his first off-the-farm job working at Ash. “So, through all that I got pretty interested in astronomy.”
From JJC to JPL
Mottinger attended Joliet Junior College and then transferred to the University of Illinois at the start of his second year. But things didn’t go very well. “I had an absolute disastrous start in German. I had never taken a foreign language before and I had to have two years of it,” Mottinger said. “And one summer I took a computer class so that I could graduate in four years, and I nearly flunked it and went on academic probation for my senior year.”
But Mottinger persisted in his studies and graduated with an astronomy major and a math and physics minor. Several years later he received a master’s degree in systems engineering.
“I’ve never been shy about talking about the disasters I’ve had in the classroom,” Mottinger said. “ I’m no ‘whiz-bang’ when it comes to academic achievement, but I think getting a degree demonstrates you’re willing to work at something and see it through.”
His persistent attitude paid off in his search for his dream job. His aspirations were to work at JPL.
“I had an interview at JPL, but I didn’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure out that they weren’t interested in me after the initial interview,” Mottinger said.
He then applied at several aerospace companies and was offered a job at Northrop Nortronics in Hawthorne, Calif. Mottinger said he felt like “a fish out of water” among electrical engineers, but later was assigned to a division involving satellites.
After close to a year of doing what he called “very routine work,” he was notified of a program where Northrop sent engineers to work at JPL on a contract basis, and was asked if he was interested.
“Was I interested?” he exclaimed. “Gosh, yes!” And in February of 1968, almost a year to the day from that disastrous first interview with JPL, Mottinger began working there as a contractor for Northrop.
Needless to say, Mottinger was thrilled. “When you walked down the halls of the operations building at JPL, on one side of the hall they were going to the moon and on the other side they were going to the planets,” he said.
In some of Mottinger’s first missions, he worked on both sides of the hallway. He was involved with the Lunar Orbiter and Surveyor missions to the moon and Mariner 5 that flew by Venus.
The group he was assigned to was responsible for deep space navigation, that is, tracking and guiding a spacecraft outside of earth orbit. Ground-based tracking stations received navigation data from the spacecraft to follow its progress. The navigation group used that data to provide estimates of where the spacecraft should be at any given time to make sure the scientific mission objectives would be met. Every mission involved going somewhere new or doing things that had never been done before.
But no one was maintaining records of all the information that was being acquired that would specifically benefit navigation on future missions.
Mottinger said, “My first assignment was to find out what all was being done and find ways to combine the individual estimates so that we could reduce the sources of navigation error. Then for the next mission, our navigation requirements could be a little tighter.”
Mottinger helped evaluate the data to create higher accuracy value inputs for the navigation computers.
From the information unveiled by Mottinger came discoveries and insights. For example the engineers were able to create pressure models for the pressure from particles of sunlight that push against a spacecraft and alter its trajectory. In the Lunar Orbiter missions, it was discovered that there were large concentrations of mass, (now called mascons) underneath the moon’s surface that were accelerating spacecraft in orbit.
The engineers also came to better understand how gravity from any celestial body affects a spacecraft. In flying to a planet, the navigation team has to account not only for the gravity of the planet, but also of any moons orbiting that planet. The science of orbit determination relies on intensive numerical calculations to predict the position and movement of any object, and Mottinger helped develop the computer programs to do those calculations. That technology continues to be used today in spacecraft navigation.
JPL to Mottinger: Why not stay here?
When Northrop’s contract with JPL was about to expire, Mottinger was told that JPL wanted him to stay on. Mottinger was flattered. He received a letter stating he was being hired by JPL for one of three reasons: for outstanding work achievement, for outstanding academic achievement, or for outstanding character. Mottinger didn’t think his work, or especially his academics were very outstanding, so he figured he must have been a heck of a character.
“I have to trace that back to my parents and my upbringing on the farm,” he said.
Only now does Mottinger realize the mixed feelings his parents must have experienced at that time.
“My parents never discouraged me from leaving to come so far. They have been grateful for the opportunities I’ve had, realizing this was the place for me to be.” Mottinger continued, “ I’ve passed the age my dad was when he and I drove out here. I can better appreciate the feelings they must have had about my decision, and I have to admire them all the more for letting me go.”
But Mottinger would return to Illinois occasionally, and used that opportunity to visit his former teachers, especially Charles Potts at Oswego High School.
“If I wrote to Mr. Potts and told him I was coming he would make arrangements for me to talk to his class or in my math teacher’s class, Mr. [Robert] Olson.”
Those classroom visits were especially serendipitous for one student. Potts’ son, Chris, became interested in aerospace engineering because of Mottinger’s presentations, and Chris now works at JPL. He is currently the Deputy Navigation Team Chief for the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission.
Over the years, Mottinger has continued to be part of navigation teams for many ongoing space missions. He was part of the Mariner mission to Mars in 1971, the first spacecraft to orbit another planet, and the Viking mission that landed the first two spacecraft on Mars. The two Voyager missions to the outer planets were very exciting for Mottinger, especially when an engineer in his section discovered an active volcano on one of Jupiter’s moons from the optical navigation pictures snapped by the spacecraft. The two Voyagers are among our first ambassadors to the universe. They are on their way out of the solar system, as are Pioneer 10 and 11, other missions Mottinger helped navigate.
Since 1983 he has been part of a group that has provided navigation support for the launch of over 100 spacecraft. That group was recently disbanded, but Mottinger will help develop the next generation of software for navigation operations.
Career a constant learning experience
His career has given him the opportunity to be constantly learning and to experience things he never expected. The problems Mottinger had with the two subjects in college came to an ironic end about 15 years into his career at JPL.
“My manager informed me that I would be flying to Germany to check out computer programs,” laughed Mottinger.
Additionally, since 1985 he has worked with two Japanese space agencies, and he can now speak a little Japanese, one of the more difficult languages to learn. He’s found that working with people from other cultures can be enlightening.
“Working with the Japanese has shattered all the stereotypes I had. We all laugh and cry at the same things and all people have the basic need to be accepted and encouraged no matter what their capabilities,” he said.
The cooperative effort between NASA/JPL and Japan is producing a spacecraft that will touch down on an asteroid, collect a sample of the surface material and return it to earth in 2007.
Mottinger says, “The people I’ve worked with at JPL are very professional and promote teamwork. They are affirming and don’t put anyone down. You don’t mind saying you don’t understand something, or that there might be a problem. You always work as a team here.”
He also added, “I’ve had some really terrific managers. They’ve recognized what I could do and what I couldn’t and found tasks commensurate with my abilities.”
Mottinger has a tendency to downplay his role at JPL.
“I’m impressed with what the people here can do. Just to be a small part of that is quite exciting,” he said. “I have never been a leader. I’ve always been part of the support team that makes things happen. I like to think I have an eye for detail. I recognize good stuff when I see it, but I’m not creative. I make sure that everything gets put together and is done in the right way, and that the software does what it’s supposed to.”
Those who know him consider Mottinger to be a modest and unassuming man who is always willing to help out in any situation. Chris Potts has had the opportunity to work directly with Mottinger over the years and said that Mottinger’s extensive experience and insight was key in helping prepare the MER team for launch.
“Neil has been involved with a myriad of projects at JPL which is a testament to his ability to grasp things quickly and provide immediate help as needed,” Potts said. “Neil has played a lead role in the development of numerous software tools that are used constantly in the orbit determination process at JPL.”
Additionally, Potts recognizes the important role Mottinger has played in his life. “His presentation in my Dad’s science class gave my life direction. Neil continues to be a tremendous positive influence for me; so much so that I no longer view our Oswego meeting as pure coincidence. I feel extremely fortunate to have Neil as a mentor.”
In his office, Mottinger has a picture of his dad sitting on a two-row corn planter drawn by horses. It’s a reminder of the strong work ethic his parents instilled in him, a guidepost that he still shares with young people whenever he can.
“If you’re having difficulty in a class, talk to your teacher, don’t be afraid to ask for help,” Mottinger says. “Get a tutor. Make it plain that you’re going to do your best…Don’t worry about temporary setbacks. When a door closes somewhere another one may open somewhere else.”
Mottinger’s perseverance and character have gotten him through the obstacles in his life and helped him experience a very satisfying career at JPL. Mottinger says he and his wife Debbie have discussed the possibility of moving back to Illinois when he retires, as they would enjoy being close to his sister, her family, and his father who now resides in a nursing home. But they’re not sure about returning to the Illinois winters.
Besides, Mottinger says, “I’m not the type of person who has a game plan for life. I never planned to go to California when I was growing up… Maybe that’s from my farm background. There were no guarantees there. Your only plan was to work hard and do the best you could. Take one day at a time.”
And as a navigator and explorer he has discovered what is important in life: “You see, life is more than the “glamour” of sending things into space. It’s about making a difference in the people we meet every day, whether they’re the ones who empty our wastebaskets, or help us fly to the planets and do things no one has ever done before.” |
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