Getting Into a Higher Orbit

Nobody expected the friendship between Enrique Garcia and Art Chmielewski to extend so far when the fatherless Pasadena boy and the Glendale engineer met seven years ago through the Catholic Big Brothers program.

Certainly not the 141 million miles to Mars.

Garcia was a 10-year-old who loved to draw cartoons and Chmielewski was a Jet Propulsion Laboratory power-system designer.

The boy was being raised in a rough neighborhood by his struggling Mexican-immigrant mother, a housekeeper who was afraid to let him leave their tiny apartment.

Chmielewski decided to become a Big Brother after hearing a 9-year-old relative of a JPL secretary comment that he intended to become a drug dealer--just like some of the Porsche-driving men in his north Pasadena neighborhood.

At first Chmielewski helped young Garcia by taking him to events like baseball games and encouraging him in his schoolwork by rewarding good grades with trips to the pizza parlor.

As their friendship grew and the Garcia matured, Chmielewski gave the youngster an old computer to experiment with and began occasionally taking him to his office at the sprawling JPL research center in La Canada Flintridge.

By last year, Garcia had learned how to program and repair computers. Chmielewski wrangled a summer job for him as a helper in his engineering office, giving the 16-year-old a front-row seat for the hoopla that engulfed JPL when Pathfinder landed on Mars and beamed pictures of the Martian landscape back to earth.

Garcia was also in the office the day several engineers stopped in to talk with Chmielewski about the Pathfinder rover’s narrow range and limited power supply.

For the next Martian trip when a larger, inflatable rover vehicle is expected to be used, it would be nice for it to have bigger solar panels, the experts agreed. And ones that would generate power no matter what position the sun is in.

When the group left for lunch, Garcia sat down at a computer and began sketching drawings of rover vehicles that did just that.

If the next generation of rovers was to be inflatable, the boy reasoned, why not make king-size solar panels the same way?

When Chmielewski returned from lunch he saw Garcia’s drawings--one depicting a robotic vehicle trailing a long, billowing tail of solar panels behind it and another showing a large, balloon-like array of collector panels above it.

“I walked by and saw it on the computer screen and said, ‘Oh, oh! How did you do that?’ ” Chmielewski recounted Monday. “Enrique said he’d copied a picture of the Sojourner and then taken its antenna off and added this and that to it. I was amazed.”

Chmielewski took copies of the drawings down the hall to his boss’s office. Charles Weisbin, JPL program manager for robotics and Mars exploration technology, studied the designs and nodded.

“I said go for it--I want to do it,” recalled Weisbin. In short order, about $200,000 was authorized for prototypes of Garcia’s inflatable solar panel designs.

Since then, JPL engineers have built mock-ups and scale models of the most promising of Garcia’s designs. A Delaware contractor is building a working prototype.

If it functions as well as they hope, the balloon-like solar panel array will be part of an unmanned Martian expedition in about the year 2003, according to Jack Jones, principal engineer for the rover project.

The inflatable rover that Jones’ design team is working on would be as large as a sports utility vehicle and would have a 100-mile travel range. The blow-up solar collectors would produce 40 watts--more than twice the power the rover needs.

Now 17 and living with his mother at a larger apartment in Upland, Garcia has wrapped up his second summer at JPL and has enrolled as a freshman computer-animation major at Chaffey Community College in Rancho Cucamonga.

This summer, he helped produce a demonstration video for JPL and worked on a short documentary about the lab.

He admitted that he is excited to see the ideas he sketched out actually take shape.

“I had no idea any of this would happen. I’m surprised Art liked them,” Garcia said with a laugh.

“They were just rough sketches. I was going to clean them up before I gave them to him.”

But the drawings were smooth enough, according to Bernardo Lopez, a JPL development engineer who has helped with mock-ups.

“People talk about concepts, but it takes someone to take an idea and say, ‘You’re really talking about this,’ ” Lopez explained Monday as he showed off a model of the solar balloon--made of a tough, cellophane-like film called Kapton.

Garcia is nonplused that his initial balloon design has evolved into more of an umbrella shape (JPL’s Weisbin has asked that the final design be retractable as well as inflatable). And he laughs when JPL officials tell him how shocked officials at the Delaware company were when they learned the sketches were done by a high school kid.

“I’d like to come back when it lands on Mars,” he said. But his own career goal, Garcia said, is to eventually run his own company providing computer-generated special effects for movies.

Chmielewski, now the father of a 4-month-old son, understands. His own father, Henry Chmielewski, is Poland’s best-known cartoonist.

Chmielewski said he was pressured as a child to take art classes but was more interested in engineering.

And look where he ended up.