#pimr

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YAMAHA R15 MP 09 PRESTIGE #yamaha #r15 #mp09 #pimr #college #days #memories #never #vanish (at सतना नगरी) https://www.instagram.com/p/CSXT4H-olBi/?utm_medium=tumblr

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PIMR attendees in the Tombaugh Science Operations Center in Boulder, CO. L to R: Michael Vincent, Kim Ennico, Cathy Okin, Joe Peterson, Simon Porter, Cindy Conrad, Alan Stern.

Today was the Principal Investigator’s Mission Review, aka the PIMR.

It’s the first of two all-day info dumps that I’ll be attending this week. Ordinarily, a bunch of us would fly out to the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and conduct the multi-day meetings where everyone could talk in person, but thanks to East Coast snow earlier in the week, today’s meeting happened over the speakerphone.

We started off the meeting with an overview of all upcoming meetings (Yo dawg, I heard you like meetings, so let’s have a meeting where we can discuss all the meetings we have) and public shaming of the folks with too many outstanding project duties (you know who you are). In the course of the day, the suggestion of having fewer meetings was floated, but as the day went on, other people were like “we need to have another meeting for this”. I’m not making this up.

The very long day mostly consists of reports from people in charge of different systems giving status updates, everything from Power to Mission Operations to the IT department on on the ground. It’s a whirlwind of topics, ideas, jargons and acronyms. I’ve been working on the mission for a little over six months and I still don’t have a handle on the insane amount of groups, and systems involved with making a trip to Pluto happen, but I’d say I followed more of this meeting than any of the previous ones.

If I had to make a theme for this meeting, I would call it “Things We Are Worried About”. We even have a disaster chart that mimics the Torino scale for Earth-killing asteroids. Our chart says how badly a disaster could break the mission on one side, and how likely it is to happen on the other. We are less worried about things that probably won’t happen or things that could happen, but can be worked around.

An example of something really bad, but really unlikely is if both Inertial Measurements Units break. We have two IMUs and their job is to hold the spacecraft still. If both break, we’re screwed, but if just one IMU breaks, there’s a plan to work around it.

Right now, by far the scariest thing facing our mission, both very likely and very bad, is that a KBO target that New Horizons could reach after flying by Pluto either isn’t out there or we can’t find it in time.

We also had updates on our natural disaster plan. You might think that it’s pretty silly to have a contingency plan for a badly-timed, highly unlikely natural disaster, but last September, Boulder Colorado got a year’s worth of rain in less than one week. I can think of at least two New Horizons team members whose homes were damaged and many roads and bridges were washed away. While the network at Southwest did not go down, we were barred from coming into the building and people who were out of town didn’t get back home for days. We’re making sure that our computers are not all in the same building at APL, and there are other computers in different weather areas in case of a giant killer hurricane. We are not the sort of people who think bad weather can’t happen to us.

Despite all these scary things that could go wrong on a spacecraft that we can’t fly out and fix, and the fact that our hardware has to work flawlessly 9.5 years after launch, our payload is reported to be in good condition.

I find it pretty amazing how many things have to go right for the encounter to happen.  Tomorrow’s meeting will be more focused on encounter planning.