ON-SCREEN TEXT: A Day In the Life Of a NASA Satellite Team
with Regina Caputo, Observatory Project Scientist

Regina Caputo: So, Swift is an observatory,
and it was launched about 15 years ago

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and it's designed to study gamma-ray bursts,

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which are the most powerful explosions in the universe.

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Our day starts out like pretty much anyone else's.
We get up,

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have some breakfast, go to work,

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and get ready to do the daily planning telecon.

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That's where we decide all the things that Swift is gonna look at
that day.

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After we decide what Swift is gonna look at,
we send up that schedule to the satellite

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uh, via ground stations, which are located
all around the world.

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Swift will look at all of these various targets that we sent up--
sometimes 50 to 100 per day.

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But then, something could happen--
maybe it's a supernova,

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and then a ground-based telescope sees it.

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This observatory might want Swift to take a look to see what they can see,
so they'll put in a request.

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When this happens, we get--the Swift team gets emails

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and pages--or texts, I guess texts, 'cause nobody gets pages anymore.

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Anyway, this case is evaluated against
what we decided on earlier in the day,

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As well as other requests that people want us to observe.
These also come from all around the world.

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If we decide to approve this request, um,
what'll happen is

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we will send that information up to the satellite
via the TDRS network,

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and this is a network of satellites, uh, orbiting all around,
which allow us to talk to Swift at any time.

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Once Swift has looked at this new target, um,
and the data was sent down to the ground,

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Swift will go back to doing what it was doing before, uh,
perhaps following up on a gamma-ray burst in the afternoon.

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At the end of the day...hmm.
So, there isn't really an end of the day for Swift--

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it's always observing different targets that
we've put into the schedule.

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Um, but for the rest of us humans, we have
an end of the day just like anybody else--

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uh, go home, go to bed,
and think about the exciting day that we'll have tomorrow.

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♪

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