- Metecs News -

This September METECS is busy visiting Engineering Career Fairs at universities. We have put together a collection of videos, demos, and information so that each student who visits our booth will walk away with an understanding of the exciting work that METECS has to offer.

METECS is a small company based on site at NASA's Johnson Space Center. Our primary focus is on simulation work which relies heavily on programming and utilizing engineering skills. Although each individual at METECS is unique, we all share a strong work ethic, good communication skills, and an overwhelming enthusiasm for contributing to the space industry.

We encourage everyone from freshmen to senior undergraduate students along with graduate students to visit our booth and learn more about us. If METECS sounds like the type of company you envision yourself working for, make sure you introduce yourself to us, ask questions, and give us your resume.

We look forward to meeting you!

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METECS would like to thank our 2009 Summer interns for their hard work this summer.


Jessica Turner, Darius Williams, and James MacLean, all did an outstanding job. Contributions included the prototyping of a real-time contact dynamics engine within our simulations, the development of a 3 DOF translational hand controller for use with space vehicle simulations and simulation development, and the construction of a plastic hand controller grip.

We hope that all of our interns had an exciting summer with us, and we wish them the best in their future endeavors.

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Drake Deno has been the latest addition to the METECS team and we are very excited to welcome Drake back as a member.

Drake recently graduated from Purdue University with a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering. Drake developed a strong interest in dynamic modeling while attending Purdue and in his previous internships with METECS. As a senior, Drake led a two man team that developed an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (U.A.V.) for their senior design project over the course of the entire senior year. The project demanded initial concept design and reviews, analysis, redesign, final review, and fabrication.

Drake rejoins the METECS team for his fourth time. He was a previous intern here at METECS for three years and contributed to many tools and models. METECS is excited and glad to have Drake back and we look forward to his future contributions.

Welcome aboard Drake!

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The Metecs team is very excited to welcome aboard two interns this summer.

Darius Williams is from Pearland, Texas and is a senior at the University of Texas at Austin. In the Spring of 2010 he will receive a Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering and a Bachelor of Art in French. Darius recently participated in the UT/JSC TRICK program, a modeling and simulation initiative where a team of 8 students successfully interfaced OGRE, an open-source graphics engine with NASA's Trick simulation environment. Aside from his interests in dynamics, modeling and simulation, and languages, Darius plays the violin and will spend the summer learning the cello.

Jessica Turner is a senior at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, dual majoring in Electrical and Computer Engineering. While she is in school, she stays busy as the president of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), vice president of the engineering honor society Tau Beta Pi, and an active member in Society of Women Engineers. In her free time, she enjoys kickboxing and reading. Jessica has always dreamed of working in the space industry and is excited to contribute to it this summer.

Welcome aboard Darius and Jessica!

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Hello to all of the Purdue students!

METECS will be attending the upcoming career fair at Purdue University, and we would like to say a special hello to all those who are checking out the website and the company.

As a brief introduction, METECS is a small company currently focused on simulation work at NASA's Johnson Space Center.

This work requires students with strong work ethic, good communication skills (since our employee often correspond with the customer directly), good engineering skills, and a desire to program (the work involves engineering tasks that are normally accomplished through programming simulations).

If a small company with a dynamic work environment is something you are looking for, we would love to talk with you!

See you there.

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Angela Reeves is the latest addition to the METECS team and we are very excited to have her as a member.

Angela recently graduated from the University of Texas with a Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering. She developed an interest in dynamic modeling and simulation while contributing to a guided missile model at an internship located in her hometown of Plano, Texas. While in school, Angela led a six person team (which included another METECS recent hire, Thomas Brain) in a project which led to gaining Johnson Space Center’s support to launch the Modeling and Simulation Initiative at the University of Texas. This team successfully modeled, simulated, and animated a six degree of freedom rendezvous scenario. This task included interfacing TRICK - the simulation software used at Johnson Space Center - with the animation software in the UT Visualization Lab.

Welcome aboard Angela!

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We are very happy to announce a new member on the METECS team.

Bryce Kovel is a recent graduate of the University of Texas where he obtained an M.S. in Aerospace Engineering. While in Austin, Bryce was responsible for the rendezvous analysis of LSTAR, a mission design project that won second place in the national Ra-scal graduate competition. His undergraduate work was done at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University where he obtained his B.S. in Aerospace Engineering.

Welcome aboard Bryce!

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METECS attended the University of Texas Engineering Expo this past week and met many great students.


Thank you to all of the students that dropped by our booth to speak with us and learn more about the company. Also, thank you to the expo organizers and staffers. It was a great event and we look forward to returning.

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During this Thanksgiving, we at METECS would like to take a moment to say how thankful we are to our team members and our customers. Needless to say, we would not be where we are without such devoted employees.

A happy Thanksgiving to all of you!

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We are delighted to welcome aboard the newest addition to the METECS team.

Thomas Brain is a recent graduate from the University of Texas where he obtained a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering. While there, Thomas was also a contributer to a joint project between NASA and the University of Texas. This project simulated a two-body rendezvous using NASA's Trick simulation environment and also integrated real-time output of Trick with the Visualization Lab at UT.

Welcome aboard Thomas!

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Hurricane Ike has changed life in the Houston/Galveston area in just a matter of hours.

Metecs would like to express our sympathies to those who lost so much in the storm and the aftermath. We are looking forward to getting back to work at Johnson Space Center and getting our communities back up and running.

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METECS is very grateful to have had three wonderful interns with us this summer. Not only were they a great addition to our team this summer, they also accomplished a great deal!


Burton Chen came to METECS from the University of Texas and worked on implementing a Coulomb friction model into NASA's robotics simulation. The friction model uses an iterative numerical procedure proposed by Y.M. Kao, Y. Yang, and L. Nguyen. Burton was able to complete the implementation and show that the method successfully eliminated certain noise and unwanted behavior in the joint rates, improving our robotics simulation fidelity.

Gage Eads is also from the University of Texas. Gage worked on simulation code that models line-plane contact. This model uses collision detection to verify an intersection between a line and a plane, and then computes the necessary forces and moment about the two interacting objects to realistically simulate contact. Using this software, complex simulations using points, lines and planes are able to model intricate robotic interactions that occur on the Space Station.

Drake Deno returned this summer from Purdue University for his third internship with Metecs. Drake continued development on a contact modeling tool that he had worked on in previous internships. This tool allows users to define contact geometries and surface properties graphically. It then exports this data into a contact simulation which will adequately generate forces and torques generates by contact of the interfaces. Drake's tool was quickly put to use to generate a model used to help the astronauts train a robotics operation where a sensitive payload on the International Space Station will be inserted and extracted from a Japanese vehicle.

All in all, the interns did some amazing work! We hope they enjoyed their time here as much as we did, and we hope the experience, knowledge, and contacts they acquired will be useful to them in the future.


Good luck Burton, Drake, and Gage in your studies and your future endeavors. We hope to hear from you soon.

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Metecs is happy to welcome aboard three interns this summer.

Drake Deno is a senior Mechanical Engineering student at Purdue University and is returning for his third internship with Metecs. We have been very grateful to Drake for his work in his previous two internships and we are very happy to have him back helping us again.

We also have two first time interns with us from the University of Texas. Gage Eads is a third year Electrical Engineering student, who has also studied abroad at the University of Melbourne. Burton Chen also joins us from the University of Texas. Burton is a fourth year Electrical Engineering student there.

Welcome aboard to our two new interns Burton and Gage, and welcome back to Drake. We are very excited to have you as part of the Metecs team.

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We want to thank all of our team members and our wonderful customers for helping to make 2007 such a great year. We are really looking forward to an awesome 2008.

Have a happy and safe holiday season!

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This weekend was the robotics competition for the Space City BEST Hub which includes teams from Houston area intermediate and high schools. The event was a great success thanks to the hard work of students, teachers, mentors, organizers, and volunteers.


This year's competition had a Mars rover theme. The robots were required to drive up to a simulated landing vehicle, unload some supplies, and return them to a Martian base.

Metecs employee Frank Graffagnino volunteered to help with robot inspection at the competition. Thanks to Frank for his efforts and his support of such a great event for students to learn more about robotics and engineering.

Congratulations to all the teams that competed and a special thanks to all of the volunteers.

For more information about BEST, click here.

For more information about Space City BEST and pictures from the event, click here.

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John MacLean and An Huynh represented Metecs at the "2007 ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conference and Computers and Information In Engineering Conference" in Las Vegas, Nevada where they presented a paper which they co-authored with Leslie Quiocho of NASA's Johnson Space Center. The paper was titled "Investigation of Boundary Conditions for Flexible Multibody Spacecraft Dynamics".

We would like to congratulate John, An, and Les on the successful publication of their work.

ASME conference papers can be obtained on-line from www.asme.org.

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Patrick McCartney, a robotics simulation engineer at METECS, spoke to a group of high school students at Cleveland High School in Cleveland, Tennessee last week. The students will be beginning a program in robotics as part of "Project Lead the Way" and were interested in learning about how robots are currently being used in space. They were also very interested in hearing about the day-to-day job activities of an engineer working with robotics in the space program.

Patrick talked first about the history of the US space program and then transitioned into how robotic manipulators are currently being used to assemble the International Space Station. He also presented detailed information about work he recently performed preparing a high-fidelity simulation to analyze a robotic operation on the Space Station.

It was clear from the numerous questions that the students were very interested in the material being presented. Patrick would like to thank everyone who came and also for being very respectful and attentive during the event. Patrick would also like to thank teachers Erin Hattabaugh and Renny Whittenbarger for the opportunity to share about his work at METECS and with NASA.

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We are very pleased to announce that METECS has been awarded a three-year contract by NASA to provide Professional Engineering Services to the Automation Robotics and Simulation Division (AR&SD) at NASA's Johnson Space Center.

Under this three year contract, METECS will provide robotics, simulation and graphics support for the Shuttle, International Space Station, and Constellation programs.

We are looking forward to working with AR&SD over the next three years and contributing to the manned space program at NASA.

Special thanks to the team members who helped put together our winning proposal and to the entire team for their outstanding work.

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It has been another great year for Metecs! A special thanks to all of our team members and our customers for making this year a great one.

Have a safe and happy holiday season!

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Individuals from Metecs attended the 2nd Space Exploration Conference this past week at the George R. Brown Convention Center. We saw many familiar faces and also made many new friends.

Metecs would like to thank the AIAA for organizing the event and also thank all of its sponsors. The event was representative of an exciting industry with new goals and horizons, of which Metecs is proud to be a part of.

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Members of the Metecs team attended the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Career Day this week.

The event was wondeful. It was great to talk with the students and meet some of the faculty and staff.

We would like to extend our thanks to all of the students that came to talk with us at the booth. It was great to hear about their coursework and their plans after school.

We also want to thank Kimberly and the other Career Day staff. The organization of the event was exceptional and we really enjoyed it.

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Metecs is very pleased to announce the award of a General Services Administration (GSA) Schedule Contract. This schedule contract is a great new resource for Metecs to provide services to U.S. government agencies, allowing for a faster, more simplified procurement process.

Special thanks to all of the Metecs employees who contributed time and documentation to the effort. Very special thanks to John who devoted countless hours of attention and hard work to the task. Congratulations!

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Happy holidays to everyone! We are thankful for a great 2005 and look forward to a great 2006!

We would like to wish everyone a wonderful (and safe) holiday season.

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We would like to wish our customers, our employees, and their families a very happy Thanksgiving holiday. We are very thankful for all of you!

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Yesterday, employees of Metecs joined together with NASA employees and contractors to spend the day volunteering at the Astrodome to help the victims of hurricane Katrina.

Thanks to everyone who volunteered. Together we can all make a difference.

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