GREELEY- — David Perchlik paced through his house as Curiosity, the newest Mars rover, steamed toward its new home on Aug. 6.
His 6-year-old daughter, Charlotte, was watching with him on the Internet. She was already in a good mood, reveling in the fact that she got to stay up late. But she gazed at the screen with wide eyes.
This wasn’t like some of those other projects he’d worked on, stuff with names like Hubble, stuff he did before she was born. Everyone, even all her friends, knew about Curiosity, the strangely cute robot
with wheels that looked a little like Wall-E from the Pixar movie and was supposed to help us learn if life existed on Mars.
She wanted to tell all her friends that Daddy was the one who put that cool robot buggy on the red planet.
That’s not entirely true, and Perchlik, 49, will be the first to tell you that. But David was as responsible as anyone for powering Curiosity on its trip to Mars. Out of the many converters used by the rover that fed it juice from its solar panels, he helped design many of them.
Perchlik has to be a familiar name to anyone who’s spent a few decades in Greeley. He is the son of Sylvia and Dick, a political science professor at the University of Northern Colorado who was Greeley’s mayor back in the late 1960s and early ’70s.
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