A Shot in the Arm
For the past several months at work I have been involved in something that I like to think of as "The Great Slog". It is the slow, tedious, uphill slog to launch for the project I am currently working on...
Good progress is being made. Bugs are being fixed. The spacecraft is slowly being seen as a complete and functioning unit. Now, the probe has been a complete and functioning unit for some time, but it always takes the people who built it a lot longer to stop thinking of it as a loosley tied set of independent machines.
On the software side, it is another embedded software project. You have requirements, code reviews, test machines, etc... etc...
This morning I gave an training class to mission operations for the couple of pieces of the spacecraft software for which I am responsible. Seeing the set-up mission operations center was a real shot in the arm for me. You start realizing that this isn't just another piece of software that you are working on, it is a piece of software for a spacecraft and that's pretty cool.
During the training session people were talking about sun angles and star trackers and science observations, and plans for maneuvers once we get past Mars. I've never been part of a software engineering effort whose operational environment context included Mars before.
The process of reclaiming the larger picture of this effort, of meeting the people in charge of taking care of this spacecraft for the next 13 years, of seeing some of the operational equipment and long-term flight planning, was very energizing.
It makes one realize what the phrase "can't see the forest for the trees" means.
It also makes one wonder how many other "forests" are being missed because we allow ourselves to become too focused on the "means" that we temporarily forget about the "ends". I would imagine that there is a huge temptation to live solely within the "means" of our daily lives. To allow routine and comfort to supercede self-analysis and personal evolution.
Sports coaches have an eloquent way of handling such profound mysteries of the human condition. They say :
Keep your eye on the ball, stupid.
Sounds good to me.
_Ed
Good progress is being made. Bugs are being fixed. The spacecraft is slowly being seen as a complete and functioning unit. Now, the probe has been a complete and functioning unit for some time, but it always takes the people who built it a lot longer to stop thinking of it as a loosley tied set of independent machines.
On the software side, it is another embedded software project. You have requirements, code reviews, test machines, etc... etc...
This morning I gave an training class to mission operations for the couple of pieces of the spacecraft software for which I am responsible. Seeing the set-up mission operations center was a real shot in the arm for me. You start realizing that this isn't just another piece of software that you are working on, it is a piece of software for a spacecraft and that's pretty cool.
During the training session people were talking about sun angles and star trackers and science observations, and plans for maneuvers once we get past Mars. I've never been part of a software engineering effort whose operational environment context included Mars before.
The process of reclaiming the larger picture of this effort, of meeting the people in charge of taking care of this spacecraft for the next 13 years, of seeing some of the operational equipment and long-term flight planning, was very energizing.
It makes one realize what the phrase "can't see the forest for the trees" means.
It also makes one wonder how many other "forests" are being missed because we allow ourselves to become too focused on the "means" that we temporarily forget about the "ends". I would imagine that there is a huge temptation to live solely within the "means" of our daily lives. To allow routine and comfort to supercede self-analysis and personal evolution.
Sports coaches have an eloquent way of handling such profound mysteries of the human condition. They say :
Keep your eye on the ball, stupid.
Sounds good to me.
_Ed
posted by Ed at 2:33 PM
2 Comments:
Ed I see you work on the New Horizon's project. I couldn't find who you worked for and what your job is? Can you explain more of that. I love space and computers and want to learn more about software engineering for spacecraft. That is how I found your blog in the first place, I searched for that.
Well, a good place to start is the wikipedia entry on New Horizons, which talks about hardware platforms.
On the software engineering side, we write embedded software which in many ways is no different than embedded software for any other real-time devices, such as telecommunications equipment or even cell phones.
The main difference is that on a spacecraft you have to use "radiation hardened" hardware which is pretty tough stuff, but also very slow. Oddly, to work on the most cutting edge space applications you wind up using relatively "slow" computing resources!
Here are some good links to start any research:
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons
Hope this helps in your search. The best way to be a software engineer for spacecraft is to just be a good software engineer, and to know real-time computing on embedded systems. All of which is very searchable on google.
Hope this helps.
-Ed
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