Welcome, I think we're live now, so we're going to start our Google chat and David do you want to kind of introduce everything here? Sure, hi everyone my name is David Rose, I am with the Sailor Academy, along with NASA we're able to put this course together, it's been a privilege of mine, I work with Jeff a lot and Jeff Ellosin will be joining us today for the hangout, he is Systems Engineer himself and a project manager for the, I think we're live now, so we're going to start our Google chat and David do you want to kind of introduce everything here? Sure, hi everyone my name is David Rose, I am with the Sailor Academy, I got distracted by the broadcast going on, anyways back on track Jeff Ellosin like I said he's a systems engineer and project manager for the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite Test and that is a satellite aimed at finding stars with planets which may contain life and he's also the main lecture that you've been learning from throughout this course, he teaches the course at Community College of Maryland as well so he definitely knows his stuff and I've had the pleasure of meeting him a number of occasions and he's just a really smart really great guy and so we're excited to have him talking here today, so I'll turn it over to Jeff now, you can introduce yourself a little bit and then we'll get into some question and answers and then we'll go from there. Sounds good, thanks David so yeah I'm Jeff Ellosin so if you've watched Unit 1 and I know you all have done Unit 1 and you did your quiz at the end of Unit 1 and I am that scary image you've been seeing now for at least the first week so what I'm gonna do today is introduce myself a little bit, I'm used to teaching where I have students I can reach out and touch a little bit easier so this is my opportunity to really work with you guys and let you know a little bit about who I am, what my background is, I'll also talk a little bit about the class, give you a little bit of an overview of the class and what we'll be covering in the next six weeks or the next five weeks as we continue this course and then we'll have an opportunity to interact a little bit and you guys can ask questions, I hope to be able to answer all of them but I'm hoping that there might be some that are gonna be challenging and I won't be able to come up with the answer if that happens, David's assured me that through all the social media tools we have available we'll be able to get the answers to you so if you stump the professor don't worry we will follow up and make sure you get your answer so I want to introduce myself a little bit first so David if it's possible we've been talking about how do I introduce myself to my live class when I teach at Capital College here in Maryland, I teach system engineering and spacecraft design and so I thought about it, I thought well there's usually one image I used to introduce myself so David I don't know if you can bring that up if it's possible see if we can do that yeah sure that's me so I hope everybody can see that if we go back to that it was close I had it on the screen there for a second so if you guys can see it or if you saw it in a flash that was my eighth birthday party so so David is there a way to keep that up on the screen for a little longer or yeah can you say there you okay so that's my my eighth birthday party so to put it in context I was turning eight I was seven years old in 1969 Apollo 11 landed on the moon and I got extremely excited you know for a seven-year-old kid seeing humans walking on the surface of the moon and I'm like oh my gosh it's incredible so my parents were nice enough to travel in their old 57 Chevy with me in the summer me and my bratty little brother from New Jersey all the way to Florida that summer in 1970 and we were able to see Apollo I think was 14 by then in the vehicle assembly building if you've ever been the Kennedy Space Center that big gigantic building where they build the build up the shuttle and in the old days the Apollo rocket so so so we went down to the Cape we drove all the way down in a non-air conditioned car on Route 1 and got down to the Cape and we actually took the tour on an old school bus back then and saw the people working on Apollo and I was like this is what I want to do this is the only thing I could think of from then on was that my career was going to be somehow associated with space and and I love the idea of humans flying in space and how humans could work together as a team to get three people to the moon and back that just fascinated me so so that picture was for my eighth birthday I asked for a Saturn 5 rocket birthday cake now it may not look exactly like a Saturn 5 but it was pretty close for what what by my parents could do so we had our Saturn 5 rocket party and I was extremely excited to get more and more knowledge about what NASA did and what was this all about and I grew up in a small town in New Jersey so we didn't have anybody in the family that worked at NASA the people worked at DuPont or Hercules or the phone company so for me it was kind of a long circuitous path to actually figure out how do I get into this field and so I ended up down in Florida that it got a degree from Florida Institute of Technology down in Melbourne right near the Cape and I thought I'm gonna go to work in Florida just where I always said when I was a kid I wanted to work now I graduated college April 1986 so if anybody puts that in context in the space program that's four months after the Challenger explosion so not only was it there were new jobs at the Cape but they were actually laying people off because the shuttle wouldn't be flying for like maybe at least another year or more while they went through an investigation so I came to Maryland I've been here ever since I've been here almost 30 years now I started as a orbital mechanics person so looking at the orbits of satellites and predicting their future orbits so that we could communicate with them you have to point the antennas on earth to the satellite so that's where I started predicting orbit so but then I've kind of done a little bit of everything I've spent half my career doing human spaceflight so back when George Bush is the elder first George Bush president when he said he wanted to send people to the moon and Mars back in 87 or 88 I was part of the team at NASA headquarters as a system engineer that looked at what were the systems you would put in place to send people back to the moon and someday send people on to Mars so I got really jazzed up about that it was fantastic work but you know unsuccessful because at that time space station was still being designed and built and it was difficult for NASA to get approval for another big project to send people to the moon and Mars so in the meantime I did a lot of work with robots and so I've worked on robotic missions from space science missions like the advanced composition explorer that studies the Sun from the Earth Sun L1 point to the tropical rainfall measuring mission which has been in the news lately because of the launch of the global precipitation mission a follow-up these are missions in Earth orbit that study the weather around the earth specifically rainfall and the critical missions for learning more about our climate and about weather so been able to work on missions like that I've also worked down at NOAA NOAA the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration fly satellites that you see on the nightly news when you see a picture of the weather on the East Coast of the US or the West Coast those are from NOAA satellites and so I worked down there in satellite operations and keeping those satellites healthy throughout their life to make sure we always got good weather pictures every night so I've done a little bit of everything I've worked here at Goddard now you know the last 10 or so years mostly in either communication how do satellites communicate back and forth to the earth we have a lot of infrastructure to do that and so I managed that effort and now I've just in the last year moved to be a the project manager for exciting new mission it's called as David said the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and the goal of that satellite is to if you've heard of the Kepler mission Kepler has been in the news lately right I think just in the last couple weeks 700 new planets or so that were discovered by looking through the Kepler data and so the mission that I'm on right now I get the privilege of working with some really talented folks up at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and they're designing a series of cameras that we will put in orbit here in 2017 August of 2017 there's no way we're gonna be late August of 2017 we will be launching into orbit and we'll kind of follow up what Kepler was doing and we're gonna do additional observations to look for stars that have planets orbiting them and specifically we're gonna try to look for stars that are closer to Earth and then what Kepler looked at we're gonna look all around the sky Kepler looked in one specific area and we're gonna really focus on areas where the James Webb Space Telescope and you'll learn a lot more about that during the course I think you've already been introduced in Unit 1 to Dr. John Mather our Nobel Laureate here at Goddard who works in the James Webb Telescope he's the lead scientist and then Mike Menzel the lead system engineer on James Webb and you've heard from them a little bit you'll hear much more in the coming units but that project is going to do a lot of different kinds of science of deep space but one of the things they could do is if we find a planet with my mission and that planet happens to be close enough to Earth and the star behind it is bright enough James Webb could actually zoom in on that area of the sky and try to do a spectrum of the atmosphere if there is an atmosphere of that planet that we found so the goal is to take what we're doing which is basically just identifying through we use photometry right so as a planet might go in front of a star we see a drop in the amount of light coming from the star as the planet blocks some of the light and then the planet moves off to the side as it's orbiting around the star so we're just looking for these light curved dips to tell that planets are every year coming around and orbiting in front of the star I can't tell you much about the planet except that maybe I can give you some idea of how big it is and maybe I can give you some ideas of the mass of that planet and that's some some science that goes into doing that but I can't tell you much about the characteristics and so once we've identified primary candidates the James Webb mission will among other things as many science objectives it'll be able to focus in on those planets to see more about the composition if there is an atmosphere and things like that and the goal is to keep learning more and more about these exoplanets that you've been hearing about you think about you know 15 years ago people didn't even hardly know what an exoplanet was or if they really existed now there are what thousands of potential exoplanets out there that people have identified through one research project or through the Kepler telescope so anyway that's what I'm doing right now so so I can answer questions about that we can talk a little bit more about my background in engineering but let's talk a little bit about this course I'll give you a couple more minutes on the course then we'll kind of open this up to questions so so as the course is laid out the idea is we're not going to cover every single topic of system engineering but we're going to kind of hit some of the highlights now if this class goes well and it's been great there's been 8,000 folks who have signed up so far or more and I really appreciate the people who have kind of signed in and I hope that people stick with it and kind of fall along with the course but we're really just hitting some of the highlights you're not going to be a system engineer out of the back end of this process but you will learn some of the things that NASA does how do we organize so week one was introduction week two will be a little bit about personality types which is you might think that's a little obscure for system engineering course but you'll find that it's really key to understanding how teams work together and how system engineers kind of enable teams to work together by understanding people's personalities and how to best leverage their skills talents and personalities to be a successful united team to build the system so we'll learn that in week two week three we'll move on and we'll talk about the NASA life cycle how does NASA take an idea like we would like to study planets around other stars and identify them how does that idea become the reality of a test satellite and a test ground segment that can actually capture the science and get the scientists the data they need so we'll learn about that whole process and how we walk through that process there's a lot of formality but that formality and structure really helps system engineers take a complex problem break it down into manageable pieces and be able to walk through and you know kind of one piece at a time work your way from initial idea to launch and so we'll go through that now I warn you that week three has the most content to go through it will take the longest to watch all the videos but I could also tell you that it is court understanding how NASA does system engineering and how this life cycle process lays out so I know it'll be a little bit more onerous to get through and I know you all have other things going on in your lives so but but I appreciate you to just kind of get through that one knowing that week four when we move past we'll start to be a less video less less information that you have to absorb but it will still be fairly thorough and then week four will be on scoping how do we how do we work with the people who like scientists to understand what they want to do at the beginning so we're going to go back to the beginning of the life cycle and say okay how do engineers and scientists work together to take an idea and start to formulate what they're going to do to build a mission or a system to meet that initialized scientist idea and that's where Dr. John Mather will come in handy because he'll explain from his perspective how that works as well so week five we'll get into requirements so once I understand what the scientists want to do at a high level I have to now turn that into very specific requirements for the person on the team who's going to be the propulsion engineer who needs to know the specifications for a thruster that they need to go off and buy and they need to know that that thruster will in the end help the scientist identify planets around another star so all the things we're going to do in writing requirements specifications for these specific pieces of the satellite needs to be able to show that it can help meet this high level objective that the scientist is trying to do so so we'll talk about that in week five and then in week six we'll talk about trade studies where are the these are opportunities during the life cycle the process where you might say gee I've got two thrusters that I could pick from two different companies build the thruster that could meet my performance how much thrust it needs to perform well maybe one of those thrusters weighs more than the other maybe one costs more than the other maybe one has been flown in space a thousand times and one's never been flown in space before but it's more fuel efficient so I'm gonna have to do these trade studies to pick which one is better and more or more optimal for the application I have so we'll talk about trade studies and we'll go through a bunch of examples in each one of these units to try to use real world examples that NASA's either done in the past or things that are going on currently to put some of these ideas in perspective but the goal is to kind of give you an overview of some of the basic tools and the processes that are used when NASA tries to take ideas and create active missions from them so that's really the goal of the course so from there again you know I think David we can just kind of move you know to questions and start you know getting some feedback from you guys about what's already been confusing or things you just like to know about what the course is or how system engineering works so David I'll leave it to you to kind of pick a first question sir yeah we've had a bunch people kind of upvoting this one question in the board so someone asked sometimes it's difficult to see the borderline between systems engineering and project management meaning schedule risk costs so how do we determine responsibilities of systems engineer versus the project manager yes that's a real good question in fact so it's 11 o'clock ish here on the East Coast US I got in around 7 o'clock and I spent probably the first hour and a half of my day sitting with my lead system engineer walking through events of the last few days and decisions that need to be made so we are kind of the closest knit group within our project team me and the lead system engineer have to work hand in hand so I don't think you can always discern which one of us is which at any given time but I actually was thinking about this question and how you would differentiate the roles okay so we're in a meeting and we're talking about some technical issues so we have a fascinating spacecraft where we have to keep the cameras pointed at the same stars for two weeks every orbit while we collect data and they can't move we need one star to be on specific pixels on our CCD so we have CCDs just like a camera you would use right so we need the one star that we're looking to see if there's a planet going around we need its light to stay focused on a specific set of pixels so that we know that if we see a drop that that drop in light the amount of light coming in means a planet just went in front but we can't allow the spacecraft to shake okay well there's a lot of things that can cause the spacecraft to shake not only are there are things coming on and off solar arrays moving back and forth physical things that happen that might cause the satellite to tilt a little bit but all the thermal stresses in the satellite you've got computers running you've got the heat of the sun shining on one part of the spacecraft and then it's moving as you're going around in your orbit to shine on another part so all of that can add a little bit of heat to the system that could change the cameras there's four cameras they all come down into a composite plate they fit inside a plate if that plate was to call it potato chip if it was to kind of change its shape and deform a little bit as it gets a little teeny bit cooler and a little bit teeny bit warmer that plate movement can cause the cameras to move their orientation and then the light of a specific star will not be on the same pixels and it might not be in the center of the focus where we wanted it so it's okay so we have a big meeting yesterday and we're talking about how do we make sure that the teams know how to build everything to make sure that the stability that we need of the cameras is met so the system engineer runs the meeting it's a technical meeting and his goal is to understand from a technical perspective all the different things that thermal engineers had this concern the people who are building the solar array drive motor have a different concern the people who are building the wheels that spin around that point the satellite there's big wheels on board that help point the satellite they have a different set of concerns the scientist is sitting at the table he's got a different set of concerns about the stability he thinks he needs to be able to collect the data he wants so the system engineer is running that meeting as the project manager I'm in the meeting and I want to hear all the different perspectives as well so but I'm letting the system engineer run the meeting and ask all the technical questions to really pull from the technical team what are the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches that they might take to meeting the set of requirements for stability now at the end of the meeting no decisions are made but the engineering team puts together a recommendation and they say okay the system engineering lead is kind of talk to everybody we've had these meetings and we think from an engineering perspective here are the the way we should go we should buy a certain kind of solar array drive we should make a decision to make this plate a little bit thicker the composite plate so it can handle thermal stress is better and here's why here's all these things we think we should do to make sure the spacecraft meets its requirements okay now it's up to me I'm the project manager I have the other side of the responsibility the budget we have a fixed budget we only have a certain amount of money to spend I keep a certain amount of that in reserve so typical on an asset mission you'll find that the prices that you initially think it's going to cost to build a satellite might be you know some amount but you usually see growth and there's a system engineering there's a standard chart that shows over years every mission you come in with a price and usually by the time you launch you're 20 to 30 percent growth in that price so it's so you usually hold 30 percent of the money back at the beginning and you only give it out to the team it's held in reserve as the team needs it as challenges have to be met that weren't planned on and so that's what's going to happen is as a team comes forward and says now that we really tried to understand this specific engineering problem we're going to need more money because I got to build a thicker plate or I'm going to have to build a different kind of control system than I thought I was I'm going to have to get some more money now it's my job as project manager I've sat in with the system engineers I understand the issues that they were addressing I'm an engineer by background myself and now I have to weigh the pros and cons and make the decision about is it wise to give up some of my money reserve or in some cases this might cause the spacecraft to be heavier by making these changes and I can only afford to have the spacecraft be a certain mass at launch so again I might have to work with the lead system engineer and say gee I'm not sure we should go forward with this I think maybe the second best option engineering wise might be better from a programmatic standpoint and then we have to kind of work through that and make sure that we're making the right decision for the project but in the end the project manager has the other side of the responsibility to make sure that in constant schedule things are being maintained but that doesn't mean again I'm an engineer by background so I sit in with system engineers to talk about their issues and understand their what they're working through the system engineering manager the lead for the system engineers is concerned about money and schedule as well so it's not like there's a clean line between us but in the end I'm the one who has to make certain programmatic decisions they have to provide technical recommendations where they've talked to all the engineers that they need to to come up with what they think is the right approach technically so the other thing is that I get to be the supervisor so the system engineering lead has just technical responsibility which I just say which is significant I also have to be the supervisor so as the project manager I get the other role of making sure that the team members are all performing the way they should be and that the team is united and unified as a single team and so that's sometimes challenging as well I have to do performance appraisals I have to give negative and positive feedback when employees are having certain kinds of issues I have to make sure we've staffed the team properly so I have to interview candidates and bring them on a team so and I have to make sure that as I'm bringing people on the team I seek advice from my system engineering lead to make sure I'm bringing on people that we think are going to be good contributors and fit in with the kind of dynamic that we built so it's not a clean cut division you'll find that a lot of people move from system engineering to project management back and forth I think you know I have the I think as project manager you kind of get the best of both worlds because I get to be the the overall lead for the project but I also get to dip into engineering every day and I can't tell there's nothing more exciting than working in engineering at NASA it is it is fascinating is everything I thought it would be when I was seven years old and 20 times more that's a really long-winded answer David but that's at least one question down that's great that actually kind of leads into another question that we have Marcus asks he kind of mentioned that he thinks a lot of the students in the class are having stars in their eyes about what an actual systems engineer has and so he says are most systems engineers grown from the ground at NASA or have you seen many successful project managers and systems engineers come from other industries what's the worst part about being a systems engineer or project manager okay so so when it comes to where system engineers come from at NASA it's a good point and it's probably true in any industry right so I'm going to tell you how I got there and this is probably I don't it's going to be sound demeaning to other system engineers and I don't mean it to be but I'm not a great engineer okay so and I'll put that in context right I was not the straight A engineering student I am not the miracle math person that could do calculus I've I've been with engineers who jump up to the board and they start doing calculus on the board and I'm like oh my gosh I have no idea what you're talking about so so there are people that I've worked with that are incredibly talented that are much better at math and and things than I am and a lot of times they don't want to be the coordinator organizer they love to be challenged with mathematical problems with engineering challenges but they don't want to have to deal with the fact that the other engineer down the hallway is a little difficult to work with or that other engineer is always kind of a loud mouth and tries to overwhelm any meeting and get his point across and so that's where the system engineering people have to come into play they have to be the people kind of willing to work with everybody and so so when it comes to like our system engineers people that have been say working as a discipline engineer maybe a thermal or propulsion engineer and then they say now you know I've been doing this for 20 years I think I've worked on a lot of projects I'd like to move up and be a system engineer that there are cases like that and I don't want to downplay that at all but but in a lot of cases you'll find that there are people who maybe aren't the best engineers at the really detailed technical level but they are very good at organizing a team making people with different personalities come together and all feel like they're benefiting the team and then get this big product out the back end and kind of you got to go through some really stressful moments because you might have a thermal engineer yelling at you at one side of your head and then a propulsion engineer yelling that if you make that thermal engineers decision then you're going to ruin the whole project and and so the system engineer has to be the blue that says I like this role I like having to work with everybody but but it also and this is where I meant by I'm not the best engineer in the world it's also a role where you don't want to micromanage the engineers you want to help them guide them challenge them understand them things like that but you don't want to do their job and so what happens is a lot of times if you're a really talented engineer you'll look at what everyone's doing and say oh gosh why'd you do that I wouldn't do that here's how I do it and you'll try to fix everything and then you kind of kind of make the team a little feel like oh boy he's doing everything there's no sense in us and and no one person really could do everything especially on a big NASA project so so I think the thing is that a system engineer can be somebody and I would say most of my career I've been a system engineer that out of school even I quickly became somebody who the team came to to kind of help coordinate and organize activities and so I became somebody who was kind of thought of as always a sympathetic ear somebody who would listen and not just always talk because a lot of engineers like to get their point across and have a hard time absorbing the counterpoint and so a system engineer needs to be able to listen very carefully before making any you know actually you know do it taking any action or making the statement so so that's really what the role of system engineer is so I always really feel like that people matriculate to where their skills lie and if their skills really lie in detailed engineering they might be frustrated by a role of a system engineer where they don't get to do the hands-on engineering work that a subsystem engineer or again a propulsion engineer or a thermal engineer might get to do but on the other hand it could be very rewarding to lead a team of engineers and to be able to get them all to contribute in a way that makes the mission successful so when it comes to what's hard about system engineering I think it's really that you have to again be able to draw out from all the team members all the factors that they're thinking about and things that worry them and their perspective to be able to make decisions and again you know I've worked with many engineers over 30 years and you guys have interacted with folks and projects and stuff whether it's been in school or at work team members all come at this differently and I think that the most frustrating part of being a system engineer or even a project manager is that sometimes you feel like team members are not contributing as well as they should be or that they're maybe pushing the team in a direction that's not healthy for the team and you really got to be the one to have the very the heart-to-heart discussions you have to be the one who really steers the ship you can't allow any one team member or group of team members to start to get you off course as a team or to get the team to where everyone's feeling a little bit dejected or everyone's feeling like oh boy those guys over there are doing x they don't ever include anybody in conversations and so it's just like any project that you've ever worked on so I think that's really the hard part in the part that can be stressful as a system engineer is knowing that you really have to make decisions based on inputs from everyone and you have to kind of modulate for yourself all the different inputs you get and and that you have that end responsibility for those decisions. That's great Kevin. Yeah yeah there's actually you kind of mentioned this in a lot of different answers to this kind of ties in well so in sub unit 1.4 everyone watched the Gentry Lee's talk that great talk and so Ian asks so the the attributes that he went over it seems to imply that you have to have some time served on projects before you you can become a systems engineer and so if he asks how many years would you say on average it takes to be a competent systems engineer. Yeah so so it's a real good question and a good following what we what we've been talking about so as far as how long it takes I think that the goal is to not think of it as how long it takes before you could be a system engineer but think about it as far as the scale of the project that you might be able to be a system engineer on okay so the James Webb Space Telescope oh gosh I don't know Dr. Mather might know better than I so thousands of people around the world working on the James Webb Space Telescope probably 20 years to go from idea to flight you're going to have to have some pretty senior system engineers on that project to be able to guide that team the engineering team might have you know a thousand people on it just the engineers system engineering group might be hundreds and hundreds of people so you better have some pretty senior people who have been through this many times before but think about my mission I have one mission system engineer one lead system engineer I have three or four subsystem engineers at Goddard our spacecraft is being built by orbital sciences out by Dulles Airport in Virginia the science instrument is being built at MIT and MIT Lincoln Laboratory right outside of Boston so in our case we're not doing the work here at Goddard we're having contractors do it but we need to provide some oversight to make sure that the government has insight into what's happening and make sure that we think the satellites being built to our specifications so our engineering team is very small now on an engineering team that's very small being newer at this and not having as much experience you might be able to play a pretty significant role in helping to maybe you're not the lead system engineer but you might be a significant junior on that team that's helping make sure that the team has come in together so so I think again I've been a system engineer most of my career but I could say my early teams not only were they very small in size but the impact we had the amount of money we had to spend and the the the amount of mess we could make if we messed up was pretty small in the nasa universe and so that's where a more junior person who wants to be a system engineer could find a position where they can actually start to contribute almost right away so when I was working in orbital mechanics I quickly became the team lead and and that was a kind of a role of a system engineer was trying to organize and keep things organized so but but that was a very small job that was a very small group and so that's the way I'd say it it's not how long do you have to work to be a system engineer but don't set your expectations of gee I'd like to be the system engineer on the web telescope well gee a person like Gentry Lee who I hope you guys have watched that video Gentry Lee is fantastic and so he's one of the best we've ever had at nasa from a system engineering standpoint so folks like that they've been through this life cycle not only again and again and again but on different size missions they don't start at the top on a giant mission they started on lower level missions where they could learn and then when you learn it's think of a small mission there are less people your exposure to almost every little area is going to be more significant on a mission like mine where there's only a couple engineers on the staff when you're up at James Webb Space Telescope a lot of this system engineers will only focus on one science instruments development or on one part of the spacecraft because you have a giant integrated team so think of it as on a small team it's a good place for younger folks that are newer to the field to learn a lot about every aspect of the mission so so I kind of answer that question that way great and then kind of building off of you know Gentry Lee's attributes of systems engineers we have another question in which someone asks we've learned a lot about the personal characteristics of successful engineers he said I'm sure many students have been excited by most of the concepts presented but want to de-emphasize one aspect or another so what are some alternative job descriptions in industry that may be similar to systems engineering but are more focused on several but not all of those attributes he says I imagine PAO would be great for someone who is a great at big picture concepts and leadership but as poor technical strengths so what are your thoughts on that sure sure and and for folks that wouldn't understand PAO public affairs officer and I can broaden that to be outreach right so somebody who would be involved in taking what engineers do and trying to portray that to the public so I just went up I do a lot of outreach to school groups so I was just up in Lebanon Pennsylvania talking to an elementary school with a lot of great kids we talked to I think 10 classes throughout the day and tried to introduce them to what NASA does and some of the ideas we're thinking about and I went with a an outreach person a person who again takes what NASA does and talks to engineers and scientists and then when you go on the NASA websites or or watch a NASA video these are the people that translate technical speak which a lot of us engineers and scientists don't know how to speak English very well but turn what we do in to something that the public can say oh okay that's exactly what you're trying to say I know what that mission is all about so we went together so the idea was to have me talk about engineering work and and what a job and engineering would be and then this woman spoke about public affairs and outreach and what that role is and I would say the attributes are very similar when she introduced how she got into the field it was very similar that she likes to engage with people and she likes to coordinate and organize and to see the big picture so I think in Gentry Lee's talking and some of the material we put together we talked about see the big picture that system engineers can stand back see the big picture and provide guidance public affairs folks do a lot of the same kind of stuff and they can deal with very technical subjects so they can be part of the engineering team in some way but their role is specific and that is their outreach role so I think that's a perfect answer that's one for for someone who feels like they don't want to go through the engineering training but they still like to be involved in that kind of big picture of a project and making the project go from initial idea all the way through the life cycle now the only thing is don't be discouraged if you are not the best at math or whatever again I totally was not okay so it's not like every system engineer is Albert Einstein when it comes to doing math or engineering just because you're not great at it if you still have a passion for engineering and you can pass the courses so I did pass the courses and got a degree once you get in the workforce your skills at being able to organize and being able to see the big picture and work with their people with different personalities and to absorb and constantly learn I think for me a system engineer is somebody who's always thinking about learning always wanting to listen to somebody say oh wow I didn't understand that perspective right didn't that's a system engineer and so if you have that personality don't ever be don't be discouraged and say well I can't be a system engineer I can't be an engineer because I'm not really that great at calculus or whatever it I don't use calculus and I don't think my mission system engineer uses it that often but but you know there's always people on the team who are going to be those detailed people who are going to help the team and be contributors but not always true that your system engineers are the most brilliant you know on the technical side so don't ever be discouraged and say well I can't do that because I don't know that subject well that's great so another question from Vikram and he asks it seems that space systems engineers focus mostly on the planning phase and the development phase so what is the responsibility of a space systems engineer once the project has been implemented for example if something happens to the shuttle during the mission while it's in space yeah so so system engineering is a life cycle activity so from the initial ideas when scientists want to perform some type of experiment system engineers are right there with them to try to turn idea into design or initially into requirements and then into design up there there when we're testing the spacecraft because when we're getting ready to launch we have a lot of problems usually crop up but and those problems have to be addressed and so maybe some part doesn't perform as expected two pieces don't plug together the way they were designed to plug together and now again the propulsion engineer might have his thruster end of the cord and the electrical engineer the other end of the cord they don't plug together and they start arguing and the system engineer has to step in he's got the baseline set of requirements and we talk about baseline in the class and a baseline is the set of requirements or designs drawings whatever it is that everyone's supposed to be working to and system engineer has to adjudicate that issue during the testing phase and say hey there's a problem here here's how we're going to resolve it propulsion engineers are going to change this and the electrical guys are going to change that and here's how we're going to get it to work together so so they're critical through that phase of putting the spacecraft together testing it we do a lot of testing at NASA because we don't have the ability you know if your car breaks down you can pull into the shop and get it fixed once we're out of orbit we can't do that we don't have the the ability to pull into the shop so we do a lot of testing before launch to make sure that we think the system will survive both the launch environment which can be kind of you know the worst part of the trip right just getting up into space the vibration the noise the acoustics inside all of that we have to make sure it'll survive that and on orbit and system engineers are keyed examining all the data the test results to make sure we're ready to fly and then once we get on orbit we have to do an on orbit check out system engineers are then going to have to come in again and make sure that the spacecraft on orbit performs and meets all of the specifications so it survived the ride if it had deployables like solar panels or antennas that everything deployed properly and it's ready to go into operations now I would say that after it's in operations the system engineering level decreases but there is a sustaining engineering that has to happen throughout the life cycle where it's good to have some system engineers involved so I've been in operations a fair amount of my career maybe almost 10 years of my career has been operating satellites and so in that role you usually have only a few people operating it the people who built it have all gone away they're off to run another project because that's what they like to do but the people who are operating it now have to have a holistic view of the satellite so I come into work one day I'm flying a satellite and all of a sudden it's sending me data and red things are flashing on the screen and those red things represent that the battery voltage is dropped okay now I have to say well why is the battery voltage dropping and I have to do some diagnostic analysis so again this is where system engineering skills are going to come in handy I don't have an electrical engineer to look back and quickly give me an answer again those guys have all left those folks are all moved on the operations engineers which are a group of system engineers are going to have to troubleshoot anything that happens to the satellite to try to ensure that they can keep it healthy throughout the life of the mission so that's probably you know when I think about my career that's probably one area where I did use all my system engineering skills is when you are operating a satellite the people who are operating it you think of them you know in the old days you would have a hundred people sitting at consoles and they would have very small jobs to send a command up or to receive some information nowadays most of that day-to-day operations of satellites has been automated so what's left is a crew of mostly they're called operations engineers but they're mostly system engineers who can troubleshoot whatever comes up because a lot of times especially when you're operating if something goes wrong you've got a limited amount of time to fix it and you've got a limited amount of data the beauty for the folks who were building the satellite is if something went wrong they could walk up and look at the satellite they could unplug it and plug it back in and try again once you're in space you can't do that so operations engineers have to be able to take the limited amount of data they get back from the satellite in telemetry right the data that's coming into the antennas that's telling about the health of the batteries the health of the solar panels the the science data coming back all information they'd be able to take that and quickly assess the situation and then they have to be able to say okay I'm going to take these actions that I think will resolve this and so a low battery voltage on a cell maybe due to a cell failure and if a cell fails it may start to heat the whole battery up because the solar panel is trying to stick too much energy in now the one cell has failed and the whole battery starts to heat up I might have to change the way the solar panels are charging the battery so that team then makes needs to make a lot of decisions very quickly that could cut across all the subsystems on board so so I think all the way through then to the end and when we plan the end of a mission it's just as important for system engineers to be there as at the beginning because you don't want the satellite coming down and hitting land somewhere where it could hit somebody so you have a system engineering team at the end of the mission who's going to plan how do we dispose of the satellite properly whether it has to be deorbited and put into the ocean somewhere to safely stay away from populated areas or whether it could be passivated on orbit you know just turned off and made sure that it doesn't explode as a strong word but come apart in space where it could provide a debris field for other satellites so things like propellant tanks have to you got to get all the fuel out of them because after you leave the satellite alone and you're not using the heaters anymore cold fuel like it's cold and hot from the sunlight shining could actually burst the tank or burst the propellant line and then float out as debris things like batteries when they're not being cared for after the mission is over because similarly have some kind of you know thing where they come apart and then float in space so so system engineers have to very delicately plan the decommissioning and in unit three we'll kind of start to talk about that process as well as the whole rest of the life cycle is how do you get rid of a satellite at the end of its life and it's really key for systems engineers to be involved on that end of the process as well so they are absolutely involved through the whole life cycle but sometimes they're called by different names so again during operations you'll hear the term operations engineer and and thinking back to that earlier question about a young system engineer where might they work operations engineering is actually I have in the college I teach is only maybe five miles here from Goddard Space Center and we provide a lot of engineering talent a lot of our graduates come to school so I probably have 40 or 50 of my former students who are able to work here at Goddard Space Flight Center and a lot of them started their career in operations engineering and operations engineering gave them their first opportunity to be exposed to all the systems of a spacecraft and how they operate together and it gives them a good jumping off point to then get a job somewhere else in the early you know in the early development cycle as a system engineer so and just to follow that train of thought a lot of times once you've been in operations for a while as a operations engineer folks will migrate into the integration and test phase and we'll talk more about that one of the units but it's the phase right before launch where you're getting the satellite ready to go up into space you have to have engineers that run the satellite on the ground and perform all the testing and a lot of times fairly junior system engineers will be involved in that integration and test activity as well running the they're not going to be in charge but they'll be there to kind of help run the testing and make sure the testing is going well so so there are many opportunities throughout the life cycle for systems engineers at all different levels of skill and experience to kind of play a key role that's great so Jeff we've talked a little bit about engineers you mentioned yourself included that you know weren't the best at math weren't the you know most intellectually advanced students in the class so we have another question that says but what about people who are strong in those areas but have limited project experience how would someone like that become a systems engineer what would what would their path look like sure so so it's a good question and it says kind of two two ways you can do it so one is again if you have a really strong interest in some field some folks who are very good at the math and science and engineering will move into that part of the field so system engineers it's a it's a question that says you know a lot of times I don't know 10 years ago there was really little talk about system engineering 10 or 20 years ago system engineering as a discipline right so you know well let me just step back for a second to talk about how this course even came to be and that is that as NASA started to get more and more involved in missions that weren't maybe they're having some cost problems or having some technical problems NASA started to think more and more about the fact that system engineering was just as important as electrical engineering or mechanical engineering but there wasn't like you know people didn't graduate college as a system engineer they graduated as an electrical engineer mechanical engineer so a good friend that you'll hear hear from in one of the next google hangouts Lisa Guerra she worked with with me in NASA headquarters and she decided to take some time NASA had her go to the University of Texas Austin and develop a curriculum that could be used by universities around the country in system engineering now it's the curriculum I use as the basis for what I teach at Capital College for the last four or five years so so the work she did was to try to say okay wait a minute college students should be exposed to system engineering even though they're going to graduate with an electrical engineering degree or mechanical degree they should have at least one or two classes where they learn the system discipline the processes the the tools things like that so so it was critical for NASA to say wait a minute we need to expose people early on to these concepts so that they are thinking about them as they mature through and they and they start their careers so so this interaction that we've now had NASA in the Salar Salar Foundation you know kind of grew out of that as well that we started to talk about we need to reach out more to people to provide them some insight into some of these things tools and processes so that more engineers will be thinking about this so even if you come in so so to go all the way back to the question you asked so when you come in and say you're a very talented electrical engineer and you've gotten really good grades and you're really good at the math and you love electrical engineering but you also have an interest in this kind of system perspective right so okay so you come out of school and you can go in and be an electrical engineer and ask the needs electrical engineers for sure on satellite development and along the way as you're doing your electrical engineering you're sitting in on a lot of systems meetings and you're absorbing oh what are their propulsion guys doing over there what are the attitude control guys doing over there let me go talk to them at lunch break and kind of learn a little bit about what they're doing while you've got this one job that's really using all of your skills and talents you learned in school and you're really starting to hone your skills in that one area so so I think for somebody who's really talented and comes out with an electrical degree or mechanical degree that's one path is to say let me go into that field really learn more about how that field is applied so I go take my school learning and now learn how electrical engineering is done at NASA but I'm really wanting to be a system engineer so I'm going to very early in my career be talking to people sitting in on meetings you'll find that in at NASA the system engineering leadership here has you know a very open attitude and you know when when people come and you know I'm an electrical engineer in your team I'd really like to sit in on some of your review board meetings where you talk about some of the big picture aspects of the engineering of the satellite and you'll find that you know people usually excited to know that there's a young engineer who would like to be involved as a system engineer at some point in their career because I'll tell you what a lot of engineers shy away from it because they don't want that call it a hassle they don't want the complexity of having to deal with other people they would like to just be left to do their part of the mission given their requirements and then kind of left alone and a lot of engineers and they're very very useful to a mission love to just focus on their area so but I think it's early on if if you're very good at one discipline or some area that yeah my only recommendation is to just really get that first job in that area but always talk to the system engineers sit on meetings and try to get that exposure so they think that's one path to get there so we probably have time for about one more question before we got to wrap this up but I think this last one ties in perfectly for the next module coming up so Rob asks as engineers we have to work with scientists so to what degree do we need to be able to understand their science for the payload package do we need to be able to completely understand complex math or do we rely on translating their expertise and so this works well with you know next week John Mather will talk about the scientists perspective of understanding engineers but I think this would be great to get you know an engineer's perspective of understanding scientists yeah yeah thanks David so it's it's both fascinating and frustrating at the same time right because it's fascinating because you know folks like Dr. Mather I mean their their experience and what they've been able to accomplish in their careers and the kind of vision they have of science that could be done given the right instrumentation is incredible you know I mean just to think about how to look back at the beginning of the universe or how to find a planet around another star I would have even never even vaguely thought of that so I'm glad that there are scientists who are thinking those big thoughts but that's the part where I'm you know in awe of what they do but the frustration comes when we have to sit down and work together in figuring out how to take their culture that they you know live in and their kind of visionary thoughts and turn that into something practical so do I need to understand all the science no not at all but what I need the scientists to be able to draw for me is what are the stability requirements for the camera that will allow me to take photometry measurements of stars to find planets that are close to the size of the earth with respect to their star pretty small right so I need them to turn that into something I can use as an engineer and that's exactly where the two worlds meet so to be honest I I love the mission that I'm on right now and usually when I'm on a mission I get very interested so I attend some of the science conferences with our principal investigator Dr. George Ricker from MIT and and I like to be there when he's talking about the science to his science colleagues and I love to see how jazzed up the other scientists are and how jealous they could be sometimes that we're getting to do this mission and they're not so I love to be there to learn about it but really for me as the engineering side and the management's project management side I need Dr. Ricker and his team of scientists to be able to translate that down into engineering close enough to engineering world requirements so I know what I have to design to to meet there you know we'll talk a lot in I think it's unit three in this scoping exercise it's where we're going to try to give you some structure to how scientists and engineers attempt to communicate with one another and in that dialogue you'll see that there's a lot of discussion about objectives so we're trying to turn what the scientist wants to do into discreet objectives so I want to find planets around other stars okay well how about I want to find earth-sized planets around other stars okay well how about I want to find earth-sized planets around stars of a magnitude between this and that and as they start to refine what they're trying to do it all of a sudden tells me aha I need a sensitivity of a detector that could be certain sensitivity for photons coming in so that I can get a reading from an earth-sized planet going in front of a G-type star say okay he wants to do the scientist wants to do an all-sky survey okay I need a camera system that over a two-year mission life will be able to move itself around and take images of different parts of the sky to provide that input that's another set of requirements so so what I'm trying to draw from that scientist is not them in let's say minutia the really critical minutia of how they're going to turn the readings we get into scientific data and then determine that that's actually the earth an earth-like planet around another star I do want to understand just that intellectual curiosity but really what I need him to say is in the end enough information so that I can say okay I need a certain sensitivity ccd I need a certain size field of view for the lenses of each camera I need the you know the satellite to be able to point those cameras all throughout the sky and that even tells me uh-oh I can't be in earth orbit very easily because if I was in earth orbit small earth orbit low earth orbit I would be seeing sun dark sun dark it would be hard to keep this camera pointed so we ended up with it's called a lunar resonant orbit so we ended up in an orbit where we fly between the earth maybe like above geostationary orbit out to the moon's orbit and back once every two weeks so we're flying out and back once every two weeks now it turns out it's uh if you look this up it's a resonant orbit a lunar resonant orbit that means that the moon as it's circling the earth it's pulling the satellite one way for half the orbit and then it's on the other side pulling the satellite the other way for the other half of the orbit which means our satellite doesn't need propellant to stay in this specific orbit it's a very nice orbit because of that okay so for two years we can just stay in orbit going around from geostationary above geo all the way out to the moon and back and that allows us to properly point the cameras to do this all-sky survey over the two years of the mission now it turns out that the sensitivity of the cameras we can put on the on the satellite for the amount of money we have and for the size of the satellite we can't actually do all of the mission objectives so when the scientists told us in the end here are all the things we need to be able to do they wanted to actually be able to measure the mass of these planets that we find that takes a lot of sensitive instrumentation more than just photometry light curves it appears that that's going to be difficult for us to do on orbit but our scientists has gotten money within our mission budget to pay for ground observatories to do follow-up observations so our mission is not only an on orbit mission it's a ground mission as well so we'll identify targets with our satellite that are good candidates for planets around other stars ground observatories will then do follow-up observations of those same targets and provide more detailed data that can give you in the end the mass of one of those planets and so when you look at the objectives for our mission it includes not only a satellite it includes a number of ground observatories that are part of our project so that's a case where in discussion with the scientists the engineers determine I can't actually meet all of your objectives by building a satellite and then the scientists said well you know what there are some earth observing systems that once on the earth astronomy facilities that could actually provide some of the additional data if they know where to point so we're going to do a collaborative ground space project to be able to meet the objectives so so again in unit unit three you'll learn a lot more about it but really the goal of scientists and engineers working together is to get scientists to give you enough information that could then turn into requirements on the spacecraft or or in our case spacecraft and ground segment to be able to meet these objectives that the scientists set out so so watch unit three coming up here in a couple weeks and you'll you'll learn a lot more unit three and four I think it's actually four that does the scoping exercise unit three will be the life cycle so so again I know David we have to kind of close out again I want to make sure I thank everybody for for signing in today to ask questions and and I really appreciate you guys signing in to take this course I hope I hope you get out of it what you want I'll be kind of dipping in David's setting me up so I can get into some of the the chat areas where you're going to be asking questions and talking to each other so I'll dip in from time to time to try to to provide some clarity where I can and then I'll also try to be look at all the sample return projects you've got a big project to do along the way and for those who choose to do the sample return project I'll make sure I try to get a look at the projects and provide some feedback as well so so David I'll leave it to you to if you have anything further we want to close out how you want to do it yeah thank you so much Jeff I think this has been great I know we didn't get to probably most of your guys questions you know hopefully you can tune in next time and we'll try and get to some then the next hangout Jeff mentioned that in two weeks on March 22nd Lisa Guara who put the original Spaces and Engineering course that we kind of adapted for this course she'll be talking and we'll get to learn from her a lot but I mean yeah nothing else from me just thank you again Jeff I think this has been fantastic really appreciate your time okay thanks thanks so again study hard get that quiz done and move on to unit two next week all right we'll see you all in week two