Sisters is home to digital pioneer

Mark Thompson takes a look back at NASA's technological history. photo by Conrad Weiler There's a lot of interest in digital photography these days, with sales of digital cameras surpassing film cameras.

Mark Thompson of Sisters remembers building the first digital camera for NASA in the early 1990s.

"We were working on the space shuttle program and the astronauts would use Nikon F4s and Hasselblad film cameras to record images from space and bring them back," Thompson said. "However, we were looking for a quicker way to see the pictures and with the building of the space station a quicker way to download the pictorial information."

Thompson, a Lockheed engineer working with NASA at the Johnson Space Center near Houston, was manager of a team with responsibility for components inside the shuttle craft. This included photographic equipment and optics to record from space.

His team of 55 engineers and technicians machine-designed an F4 Nikon for use with a CCD (charged couple device) -- an electronic light sensor -- to record digital information.

"We looked for the cream of the crop in CCDs from producing companies," said Thompson. "It wasn't easy to obtain these because of the numbers we needed.

"We also had to design the software program for using these digital cameras and then send the digital information from space over the crowded telemetry connections," he said. "It also allowed us to quickly view pictures from space and assist in any problems that might arise with pieces of shuttle equipment."

The pictures from space were of good enough quality to enlarge to 8-by-10-inch size for hard-copy viewing and for on-line viewing.

"The astronauts had a heavy schedule of duties but in their off time they did what anyone would do in space. They looked out view ports and took lots of pictures," said Thompson.

Thompson, who received his engineering degree from Florida Atlantic University in ocean engineering, met his future wife, Brenda, in a statics class. She worked as an engineer for McDonnell-Douglas working with NASA on space walk equipment used by shuttle astronauts.

When they left NASA, the Thompsons decided to live on their sailboat and traveled 40,000 miles over several years from South America to Labrador with stops in Newfoundland and Cuba along the way.

They have lived in the Sisters area for about three years.

"We decided we wanted to see the Pacific Northwest and chose this area," he said.

Active outdoors people, they both enjoy camping, canoeing and fishing in the area.