[music]
The Planetary Science Winter School is a program for
early career scientists and postdocs like myself to come
together for the first time and see how a mission goes from just
a science concept to something that could
actually fly in space one day.
The Winter School is a great hands-on experience, because it
gives us the ability to actually get involved with the design of
a real mission that might actually fly some day.
We actually are trying to develop an instrument concept
for a client, and we figure out, "Is it feasible?
How much does it cost?
How much does it weigh?"
And so we have things like volume, mass, and power to deal
with for this entire week.
My role in the Planetary Science Winter School was working with
the thermal systems leads.
We looked at our instrument and we have to determine how to
handle things related to temperature stability,
gradients, but also the environment that you're in.
My role was flight software and electrical.
I got to team up with two mentors in my case so I think
I'm double lucky.
I had no idea, since I'm a scientist I've never really done
anything on the electrical back end of something scientific, so
this is a really great opportunity for me to see
everything that goes on in design.
My role in the Winter School was basically figuring out, "What is
the design of the detector that we want?"
We learned on the first day of the study that there was going
to be a second type of detector, and so what I was fascinated by
was just watching people roll with that new information.
So there's a lot of organized chaos that comes together, where
people sort of don't really know what they're doing at first.
I think that's something you see in science in general, as you
start to do more work you realize
how much goes into things.
We just sort of run around talking to each other, saying,
"I have a problem with this.
How do we solve this?"
And together we figure it out.
[music]
The engineering part of a mission really in some ways is
the controlling part of what type of science you get to do,
and it's incredibly important for scientists
to understand that.
Now I've seen what it takes to develop these instruments from
the engineering side, and so in the future when I come back on
the customer side where I have an instrument that I want to
have built by the IDL lab, I'll understand what information the
engineering team needs in order to do that effectively.
So I think one of the next steps in my career, in the next five
or ten years, is to actually become an instrument scientist.
The only way to really start that process of learning how to
do those things is something like this, an opportunity like
the Planetary Science Winter School.
When you're thinking about scientific topics, it's really
thinking in terms of angels on pinheads, where you have this
concept that's very high-level and that isn't necessarily
well-formulated in terms of a plan to get data.
And I think the Planetary Science Winter School helps you
take the science that's in your mind and try to apply it to the
real world, to something that's more tangible.
[music]
[satellite beeping]