By Matthew Avitabile
SHARON SPRINGS & MONS LATREILLE, THE MOON — Sharon Springs Central School Graduate Trenton Witham played an important role in the successful Blue Ghost Moon landing earlier this week. Witham graduated from SSCSD in 2016 and from RIT in 2021 with a degree in Electrical Engineering. He received an internship at Firefly Aerospace in Austin, Texas four years ago. He started a three month internship with Firefly, before transitioning to a full time role. He makes circuit boards and other duties for the company. He is the lead of the Avionics team for the Blue Ghost project, authorized by NASA.
The Blue Ghost Mission 1, named Ghost Riders in the Sky, launched Jan. 15 of this year and traveled between the Earth and the Moon over 45 days. It landed on the Moon on Mar. 2, attracting international attention. The craft landed at the Mare Crisium near Mons Latreille.
The craft is intended to "help advance lunar research and conduct several first-of-its-kind demonstrations, including testing regolith sample collection, Global Navigation Satellite System abilities, radiation tolerant computing, and lunar dust mitigation. These investigations will help pave the way for humanity’s return to the Moon. The data captured will also benefit humans on Earth by providing insights into how space weather and other cosmic forces impact Earth, among other valuable research," according to the company.
“For Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1, I started as an electronics hardware design engineer. I was responsible for designing a portion of our in-house avionics system that provides power and data to various payloads, radios, and navigation instrumentation. When the design was near completion, I moved to the role of avionics lead for this mission where I was responsible for finalizing the designs of all in-house avionics, completing environmental testing to ensure the components could survive the challenges of space, and working with the other sub-system leads to ensure everything on the lander worked together to fulfill requirements and provide the best odds of mission success,” he said.
He is a major component of the hard work necessary for the recent moon landing.
“Many of the specific skills and knowledge come from working in the industry, but all of these concepts build on foundations learned in college, which are built on top of skills and knowledge learned in high school. My science and math teachers, Sally Lauzon and Ben Jacaruso, were huge inspirations that influenced my interest in the engineering discipline and steered me down this path,” he said.
We asked him about his influences, to which he responded, “My fiancée Yara. She pushed me to pursue opportunities after college that I felt were out of my league, moved across the country with me, and has supported me through all of the personal sacrifices we have both made to allow me to work on something this exciting.”
The Avionics Lead is responsible for designing and environmentally testing of the in-house avionics system, as well as ensuring the avionics works with all other subsystems. Avionics is the onboard electronic systems.
Firefly has the contracts for Blue Ghost missions two and three. That mission is planned to go to the far side of the moon in 2026.
“I’ve had a massive amount of support and congratulations from people back in New York, and I can’t begin to express my appreciation. It is immensely uplifting to hear about people being excited for something I was lucky enough to be a part of,” Witham said.
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