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Each February young scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center enroll in the Planetary Science Winter School.

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Together with a group of veteran engineers

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they have one week to work and submit the design

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of an instrument that can be proposed to fly in space. Mission proposals are not selected the first

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time around. It's a very competitive environment.

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Proposals are usually rejected when they fail to meet science, technical and cost requirements.

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A lesson that Brook Lakew, who has been on several successful flight missions learned on a personal level. I was

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designing an instrument, but the mission itself was deemed too expensive

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by NASA and was not selected. But that's the name of the

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game. Not every mission that you design flies.

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You submit several times and improve on it. And then someday you

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hope that you're going to be selected. In order to train young NASA scientists into mission creators,

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Dr. Lakew created the Planetary Winter School.

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In the Integrated Design Center they come with their abstract concept

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work with the engineers and then they face their reality if you will.

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As a young scientist, you're usually very

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focused on your science and analyzing data

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and hoping to participate in new missions. But, I think to be

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able to build your own instrument, your own mission, you really have to

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understand the engineering. The Integrated Design Center is where the

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magic happens. It's where they bring in all the different disciplines from

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communications and power and radiation and it allows us to get

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our feet wet in designing an instrument or a mission that could potentially

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be proposed to a real live NASA program one day. So if I'm going to

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be apart of a member of a large mission design, or going to be

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a PI not only should I be thinking about the science

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I should also be worrying about what the engineers can tell you. My job is

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naturally very collaborative. I work with a lot of scientists, but it's a very different way

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of thinking to go over to the engineers and talk with them.

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So one of the great things about the winter school is that we go from researchers

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to mission developers. We all learn about

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every element, from the budget to the mechanical, from the electrical and

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as scientists we typically don't have that choice. My role

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in the planetary science winter school is communications. I'm in charge of getting the data back

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from the instrument suite back home. Every time somebody made a change we had

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to figure out how long it was going to take to get things from the spacecraft back

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to Earth, how much time we had with the orbital parameters of

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the spacecraft and how much power that would take. So there we so many tradeoffs that

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every time any change was made, I had to recalculate all the numbers.

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When you're designing a mission or an instrument, it's all about trading off your science and

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the engineering. So you make sure you can keep the science you really want,

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maybe get a little bit of extra science that you'd like, but you've got to make it work.

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My vision is that the Planetary Winter

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School becomes the premiere program for training NASA

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earlier career scientists. It's a real investment in

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people and that's the most important one in my view.

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Goddard's postdoctoral planetary scientists are enrolling now for the 2016-2017 Planetary Science Winter School.

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This program is supported by NASA Goddard's New Business Office

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Chief Technologist's Office and Integrated Design Center.