Daniel Riley

Daniel Riley was a graduate apprentice of General Dynamic’s machining program, starting in 1980. In 1984, he left General Dynamics, USA. For the next 17 years, he worked in a high-end prototype machine shop. He worked in the medical device industry making prototypes for the next ten years. In 2012, he went to work as a Prototype Machinist at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA, USA, where he worked on “SWEAP” (Solar Wind Electrons Alphas and Protons) and “HI-C” (NASA’s High Resolution Coronal Imager) missions. In 2015, he joined the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA, as an Instrument Maker/Prototype Machinist, where he worked on “TESS” (NASA’s—Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) mission. After a successful launch in 2018, he went on to fabricate various antenna feed designs for the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA) project. Once the design was finalized, he set up manufacturing in South Africa and instructed the crew on assembly of the feeds.