ATK Space Systems in Goleta celebrated last month when its solar panels and a boom arm, part of the Phoenix Lander mission to Mars, worked perfectly.

Its future projects could get help from a test monitoring system designed by five undergraduate students at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Like many South Coast technology companies, ATK Space Systems sponsors a senior capstone project each year. This year, five students – Ben Elias, Nic Holaday, Christopher Calderon, Jonathan Gehrt and Aaron Rudolph – designed a system that lets ATK engineers better track the results of solar array deployment tests.

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