February 12
Lessons Learned in Taking The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) Mission from Idea to Operations
Jeffrey Volosin (Capitol Technology University; Chair of Astronautical and Space Engineering)
Abstract: This talk will follow the ~8 year journey that started with Dr. George Ricker’s idea of leveraging MIT’s x-ray astronomy experience to design and build a mission focused on finding earth-like planets orbiting nearby stars. As the project manager for this effort, from award through commissioning, I was tasked with bringing together high performing teams from NASA GSFC, NASA ARC, Orbital Sciences Corp., MIT Kavli Institute, MIT Lincoln Laboratory and a myriad of subcontractors – into a single unified team. Each of these groups had well established and successful engineering/leadership cultures that were in many cases, very different from one another. Looking back on this journey, I’ll describe both the technical and cultural challenges we faced along the way – and – the path we found, as a team, to successfully launching TESS ahead of schedule and under budget.
PSC 1136 & Zoom link
BANG! Organizers:
Matt Lastovka (he/him)
Jacob Vider (he/him)