I’m officially changing my title I
really like that one so experience is
the best teacher I think we’ve heard a
lot today about how unpleasant
experiences are particularly good
teachers I think every person in here
remembers a time where you touch
something that was searingly hot and
jerked your hand back even before the
sensation properly registered as pain
and we all know that these kinds of
experiences are way more effective than
a thousand warnings from someone telling
you be careful don’t touch that that’s
hot
touching something hot and having that
experience causes you to be way more
careful around that specific hot thing
and to be aware of and wary around hot
things in general it might even make you
try really hard to keep other people
from burning themselves by say turning
pot handles inwards on the stove all the
time I think that failures are very much
like those kinds of experiences they are
shocking they are painful but they’re
educational and focusing and motivating
and in my opinion to get the best out of
these unpleasant unfortunate events that
happen to us we need to do two things
number one really squeeze every drop of
wisdom we can out of these things that
happen to us so we can use those lessons
going forward and number two try to
cultivate a mindset that makes us able
to take in the lessons that other people
learn through their failures misfortunes
and unplanned events and use those
things to change our behavior to
actually change our thinking so that we
don’t have to learn everything the hard
way our selves so growing up I was
really interested in learning about all
things related to space I watched a lot
of Star Trek and Star Wars and
Battlestar Galactica with my mom and my
brothers and on those shows there were
often episodes with dramatic plot lines
where there was damage to the ship
because of fighting or alien force
fields or whatever and the crew had to
use their ingenuity in order to solve
those things sometimes the engineer got
to swoop in and save
the day even though sometimes it took
them maybe two or three times to come up
with an engineer with an idea that
actually worked and in the real world
I watched several documentaries growing
up about the dawn of the Space Age when
a lot of them included montages with
rocket after rocket exploding and
veering off course and falling to the
ground and even though those experiences
were really painful for everybody
involved at the very least it meant
weeks or months if not years of work
going up in smoke every time they
encountered a failure they learn
something that they could use to adjust
what they were doing and incorporate
that into their design and try again and
try again and try again until eventually
they started having successes early on
its goal I graduated from high school
I went to the University of Kentucky to
study mechanical engineering which I
hoped was going to be the first step on
a path to having a career in the
aerospace industry I was very fortunate
to learn a full scholarship that
required me to keep a 3.3 GPA now I was
a pretty good student in high school I
did work really hard but a lot of things
came easily to me so I think that made
me a little bit complacent in my
freshman semester at the University of
Kentucky they had this great program
where they wanted to take incoming
scholarship students and kind of give us
a scared-straight
approach to make sure that we didn’t
veer off track from being all on our own
for the first time and partying too hard
or whatever so they actually had a
student from the previous year
that had slipped below the
three-point-three average and was on
probation and just had one semester to
pull his grades up come and talk to us
and it turns out that I knew this guy he
had gone to high school with me and I
had wondered like you do about the
graduating seniors what had happened to
him and everybody else well he came and
told us a story of how he partied too
hard he wasn’t paying enough attention
in classes his grades fell and now he
was in this horrifying position where he
had to work extra hard to drag his GPA
up and not lose his scholarship and I
knew what was going on here right they
wanted to bring kids who were just like
us to give us a story and then
everything would be good for all the
rest of us
made perfect sense it resonated with me
I listen to a story but I think my
overwhelming reaction was yeah but I’m a
great student this is not gonna be me
inter chemistry one now all of this
incoming profession knew that chemistry
one was considered to be a difficult
weed out class it was taught in a large
lecture hall just like this one and it
was just really hard now me and
chemistry had never really been friends
in high school and instead of heeding
the warning of knowing this is a weed
out class hearing the warning from the
student that talked to us i sat in the
back of the class like I talked to my
friend I did the crossword puzzle I
didn’t go to class all the time and and
as you can imagine I wasn’t doing great
I could tell with the quizzes on the way
through that all was not going well
however I assumed that there was going
to be a curve you know everybody’s
having a hard time in this class it
probably won’t be too bad somehow
magically everything was just going to
work out okay well at the end of the
semester when they were mailing grades
home I was out of town and so my mom
called me to tell me the news and I can
still hear her opening the envelope on
the other side of the phone I can hear
the silence as I imagined her scanning
over the document and she says to me in
very serious tones okay Tracy there’s
good news and there’s bad news what do
you want first
and I’m like well I’ll tell me the bad
news we’ll save the good news for later
okay bad news first bad news first and
she said you know the class you were
worried you were gonna get a C in well
you got a D Wow
and I just had this moment of sheer
panic when I realized that I was that
guy I was turning into that cautionary
tale who’d be like talking to the
students the next time coming in and you
know don’t do it I was it right
horrifying but after a moment she said
but good news is you got an A and
everything else are you just barely
squeaked in the three point three to
eight and I felt just like I had
snatched my hand back from a hot stove
fast enough to get a blister without
doing myself more damage holy cow
so that near failure really motivated me
to change my chemistry study habits
right
so I retook chemistry one the next year
I didn’t fail but come on I could do
that on my transcript a retic chemistry
one the next semester as well as
chemistry two so I could stay on
schedule and I did what you know you’re
supposed to do i sat in the front of the
class and I showed up to every class and
I took notes and I read the material
beforehand I went to office I was the
model students in chemistry at that time
and all of that extra work paid off I
got an A in chemistry one and two and I
also realized this really great silver
lining associated with this failure it
turns out at that time I don’t know if
they still do this but the University of
Kentucky allows students to retake up to
three classes and they didn’t just
average the grades together they threw
out the first grade and replace it with
the second grade so if you were to look
back at my transcripts now it looked
like I got a 4.0 my freshman year like I
was just hot stuff but this whole
experience really let me see that I
wasted a lot of time I could have taken
in the lesson that was taught by that
student paid attention in class and not
had to go through the horror of doing it
the hard way so after graduating from
the University of Kentucky I did much
better for the rest of my time there in
case you were wondering I went to
Georgia Tech to get my master’s degree
in mechanical engineering and I went on
to land a job working for NASA at the
Jet Propulsion Laboratory here in
Pasadena California and I was embedded
early on as a systems engineer working
on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
project now if you’re not familiar with
that role a systems engineers job is to
work very closely with people who are
specialists in a variety of areas around
a spacecraft or a project like
propulsion and thermal and flight
software or ground data systems and
navigation all of that jazz and ensure
that all of those things were being
designed in a way that they were going
to come together smoothly and work in
order to accomplish the overall mission
goals so as a brand-new engineer
every person I talked to knew a ton more
than I did so it was hard not to feel a
little bit useless some of the time most
of the time I’ll kind of all the time
when I first started working and the
thing that was great is I realized that
at the lab the more senior engineers
actually appreciated when junior
engineers asked questions about
something that would drive a deeper
discussion about the work that we were
doing those of you who are students if
you can imagine or a member of time when
you were tutoring another student in a
subject that you were more comfortable
in than they were they might ask you a
question and you would know the answer
but maybe you’d go off and do a little
bit of digging and come back with a more
complete answer and that way you both
wind up with a more nuanced
understanding of why the answer was what
it was so you’re bringing value to the
student but they’re also being value to
you and helping you hone your
understanding in something so similarly
and the work that we do when an engineer
any engineer even a junior one asks a
question about something or why we’re
doing something the way we are
it can cause the more experienced
experts to reassess what we’re doing and
maybe ultimately change something when
you’re trying to develop complicated
spacecraft and instruments and send them
out to explore our new planets we’re
really stretching the bounds of
technology and applying techniques to
brand new and different mission designs
so questioning given assumptions about
how we’re doing things is a great way to
ensure we’re incorporating changes
appropriately along the way and not just
stagnating in our methods I also learned
a lot about the NASA lessons learned
database which is a way that we try to
make sure we share the lessons that are
learned by engineers so you don’t just
learn from the issues and problems you
bump into along the way that would be
expensive reinventing the wheel in space
every time Wow
so we like to gather the knowledge from
people working on a variety of different
missions and keep them in a place where
we can get to them actually you any
member of the public can go to this
website right there and look at the
contents of the Loven lessons learned
database and it includes a broad array
of issues that were that cropped up
along many many years and
the engineers have described what
happened and how they resolved the issue
and also generalized lessons that can be
extracted from that and applied to more
missions going forward it is a really
big solar system out there when we send
spacecraft like the Mars Reconnaissance
Orbiter to Mars or Juno to Jupiter we’re
sending them tremendously far away for
example the earth is 93 million miles
away from the Sun and that is a big
distance when we say things like million
this billion that your brain doesn’t
really do anything with that number but
if you were to drive a 93 million mile
line at a hundred miles an hour it would
take you a hundred and six years to
reach the end Mach one here on the earth
at sea level is 760 miles an hour that
would still take you nearly 14 years to
reach the end now we communicate with
our spacecraft using electromagnetic
waves that travel at the speed of light
light zips along at 670 million miles
per hour now we’re talking but it still
takes an appreciable eight minutes and
19 seconds for light to travel 93
million miles now when we’re
communicating with our spacecraft from
the earth sometimes the earth is on the
other side of the Sun from Mars and
Jupiter Mars is farther away from the
Sun than the earth is Jupiter is farther
still when they’re on when the earth is
over here and these planets are on this
side the longest one-way light time
distance tomorrow’s can be as much as 24
minutes and the longest one-way light
time all the way out to Jupiter it can
be as much as 50 minutes over 50 minutes
and so we really cannot just joystick
those pace crafts while they’re out
there we have to make sure they can take
care of themselves and in an in
time-sensitive situations where we can’t
just send them commands and tell them
what to do so we spend a tremendous
amount of time trying to go through all
of the horrible scenarios we can come up
with for things that could go wrong and
anticipating them for example this is
one of the kinds of tools that we use
this is called a well this isn’t it I’ll
show you what it’s it’s called a mission
fault tree where we try to take a very
critical event in the mission like
launch for example if
does not go right it is game over for
everyone and we take lunch and we say
well let’s break that down into all the
major things that could go wrong to make
lunch not be successful
for example maybe your spacecraft is not
producing power or it’s losing power or
something in a temperature sense
component is getting way too hot or
getting way too cold maybe you don’t
have a communications link with a
spacecraft maybe you’re not even on the
right trajectory and so on and so on we
think of all those big major things that
could go wrong and then we’ll take each
one and expand it out well why aren’t
you producing power well maybe my solar
arrays did not deploy when they were
stowed up on the launch vehicle maybe
they’re deployed but they’re not
producing power and so on and so forth
and then you take each one of those like
say well I didn’t your solar arrays
deploy well maybe the latches that hold
it shut when you’re on the launch
vehicle just didn’t release well maybe
that release but then you had a hinge
that seized up well maybe the hinge was
doing just fine but you had a damper
that froze and maybe the damper was fine
but and so on it’s on you get the idea
lots and lots of things and we keep
going and do that for every branch and
sub branch and sub branch and so on and
so on hundreds of items for each of
these major events that you might want
to choose and when we get down to the
things that are like the leaves on the
end for each one of those we say well
how do we either prevent that thing from
happening like say and our last valve
and on our damper issue we’re never
gonna let anything get anywhere near
cold enough for a damper to freeze okay
and that or you make the spacecraft be
capable of dealing with it even if it
does happen like in the last valve in
the last example maybe you have two pyro
valves that will fire and only one of
them needs to fire for the whole thing
to let go and then for each one of those
things we figure out a way to prove to
ourselves that that either robustness or
prevention is going to work by doing
some analysis or some tests or some
inspection and so on and so on this is
an incredible amount of work but it’s
important because once our spacecraft is
hundreds of millions of miles from us
you can’t go whack it with a wrench and
make something
so we have to do all of this stuff up
front this is just one of the many ways
we try to go about problem proofing our
spacecraft but we know from decades of
experience that no matter how much
analysis you do no matter how much
design tweaking you do chances are good
just because of the sheer novelty of
what we’re doing that everything is not
going to go exactly according to plan
but the idea is if we spend this much
time beating down on all the issues we
can possibly think of the ones that slip
through our hopefully ones that we can
just deal with in flight so this is
going to be example from my recent
experience on the genome mission now
Juno launched in 2011 on his way to
Jupiter and it took a big looping
pathway out beyond the orbit of Mars
looping back in by the earth in 2013 in
order to get a gravity assist we needed
the earth flyby in order to increase the
acceleration of the spacecraft enough to
get all the way out to Jupiter three
years later in July 2016 now the earth
flyby event is not critical in the same
way that launch is because we did all of
the final trajectory correction
maneuvers weeks and months in advance to
set the spacecraft up on his path to do
the flyby so at that point it was really
all just physics now we were doing some
things with the spacecraft like turning
instruments on and allowing them an
opportunity to take data from the earth
as a practice run for when we finally
got all the way out to Jupiter so we
were we were interested in the
spacecraft still doing stuff and on the
day of Earth flyby
we knew that the spacecraft was going to
go on a path that took it behind the
earth with respect to the Sun where we
going into the Earth’s shadow and we
knew that we planned for it we designed
for it we did analysis to make sure
nothing on the space rock was going to
get too cold when it’s here in the
shadow we made sure we had enough energy
in the battery because the spacecraft
would be just relying on its battery
there’d be no Sun on their Ray’s to
produce power I also knew that Juno was
based largely on Mars Reconnaissance
Orbiter heritage on that spacecraft at
Mars it goes into the Mars shadow with
back to the Sun every couple of hours
every orbit and the hardware has always
worked just fine on Juno this was going
to be our only time passing into the
shadow of a planet after launch we
designed the orbit so that when we got
all the way out of Jupiter if you guys
are the Sun the spacecraft is orbiting
this way so it would always have Sun on
the erase one of the things we do at the
lab in order to make sure we spread the
knowledge around of things that people
have learned on other projects is have
engineers on a mission present our plans
for major events like this to very
senior engineers and managers at the lab
in order to ask them for their advice
and suggestions on other things we
should do or think about before we
actually go do this event so we
presented presented all our plans and
all our details people gave us plenty of
suggestions things to go look at but one
of them also reiterated the fact that
this is a unique event in your mission
you need to really be careful about it
look at everything with with critical
eyes double-check triple-check we
totally agreed we’ve already done that
but we went back and did it again we
looked at our analysis some more we did
a couple of additional cases everything
looked fine and in my mind the hardware
was designed to do this the analysis was
showing that it was fine everything was
checking out we were gonna be testing
the sequences so we were good to go I’m
a day of Earth flyby we had our whole
operations team in our to Mission
Support areas it was a very exciting day
it’s always exciting when big things are
happening and we even had this really
cool outreach event going on where ham
radio operators all across the world
were sending a synchronized high signal
to the spacecraft that we would be able
to pick up with one of our instruments
and then tell the world later we heard
you when we were going by super cute
right so it was really exciting the
whole world was watching and we were all
in this together waiting for the
spacecraft to go by and it’s last close
close past the earth before it headed
out on its way all the way out to
Jupiter and so on that day we all have
our eyes glued to the telemetry
everything is going picture-perfect tick
tick tick all the way through we were
getting near the point where we were
gonna go across the day/night terminator
and the spacecraft was heading into the
darkness and everything was still going
fine
it went picture-perfect until it got
about 12 minutes into the 19 minute
Eclipse and then the spacecraft was
monitoring its internal power state it
hit a limit that we told it to respond
to and turn all the instruments off and
turned it and headed back to earth and
sent the message that something was
wrong with it
my thought was you have got to be
kidding and we looked at this so many
times how did we miss how did I miss
this now the first thing you’re
concerned about when something like this
is happening is is the spacecraft
healthy and safe and happily we could
see in the telemetry that it was but we
needed to wait until we got all the data
down so we can figure out exactly what
had happened and it was a long and
complicated story but it boils down to a
few things number one there was a little
bit of a design change between MRO and
Juno and the power system which wasn’t
being quite reflected in the traditional
way we were still doing the power
analysis on the ground and there was a
little conflation between how we chose
the initial starting battery charge
level and the level that we had
programmed it to respond spacecraft are
only gonna do what you tell them to do
right so this whole thing kicked off a
long investigation for us and an
improvement of our power analysis
process and the silver lining of that is
we spent a lot more time and effort on
that than we might have if earth flyby
had gone completely fine and if we had
decided much later in the game to do a
major upgrade to our power analysis
process we would have been trying to do
that piled on top of all the other work
we were doing to get ready for our
arrival at Jupiter and all the other
stuff we’ve been learning since we got
in orbit so that wound up being a great
silver lining and the big takeaway for
me was it’s really hard to spot tiny
nuance problems in the back of your mind
subconsciously you really think there’s
nothing wrong but if you can switch your
perspective convince yourself there is a
problem and you have to find it then you
can bring that laser focus to what
you’re doing now the problem is you
can’t spend ten thousand hours on ten
thousand tiny little insignificant
issues most of which are unlikely but
you have to find the way to focus in on
the ones that matter and thinking about
new different unique events is usually a
pretty good place to start
so for me I’ve been working at the lab
for 17 years I’ve had the fortune of
working on three different flight
missions Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
Kepler and Juno and what I’ve learned is
that it’s those issues you bump into
along the way that teach you the best
lesson these are the ways that we as
engineers grow into more experienced
veterans and are more able to recognize
and predict potential issues in the
future last thing I wanted to leave you
with is this a lot of people think that
the path to success means you make the
wrong turn and you wind up at failure or
you make the right turn and you wind up
at success but in my experience and I
think we’ve heard a lot here today the
right path to success typically leads
right through failure as evidenced by
this failure leads you to learn a lot of
things that help get you over the
obstacles in your way towards success so
the next time you have an unpleasant
unfortunate event happen to you please
resist the urge to put it behind you
close your eyes to it and never speak of
it again that would be such a waste it’s
already happened so you might as well
pull it in close and peel away all the
layers and get every last ounce of
knowledge you can get out of it because
those are the things that are gonna help
you on your path to success thank you
you
[Applause]
really like that one so experience is
the best teacher I think we’ve heard a
lot today about how unpleasant
experiences are particularly good
teachers I think every person in here
remembers a time where you touch
something that was searingly hot and
jerked your hand back even before the
sensation properly registered as pain
and we all know that these kinds of
experiences are way more effective than
a thousand warnings from someone telling
you be careful don’t touch that that’s
hot
touching something hot and having that
experience causes you to be way more
careful around that specific hot thing
and to be aware of and wary around hot
things in general it might even make you
try really hard to keep other people
from burning themselves by say turning
pot handles inwards on the stove all the
time I think that failures are very much
like those kinds of experiences they are
shocking they are painful but they’re
educational and focusing and motivating
and in my opinion to get the best out of
these unpleasant unfortunate events that
happen to us we need to do two things
number one really squeeze every drop of
wisdom we can out of these things that
happen to us so we can use those lessons
going forward and number two try to
cultivate a mindset that makes us able
to take in the lessons that other people
learn through their failures misfortunes
and unplanned events and use those
things to change our behavior to
actually change our thinking so that we
don’t have to learn everything the hard
way our selves so growing up I was
really interested in learning about all
things related to space I watched a lot
of Star Trek and Star Wars and
Battlestar Galactica with my mom and my
brothers and on those shows there were
often episodes with dramatic plot lines
where there was damage to the ship
because of fighting or alien force
fields or whatever and the crew had to
use their ingenuity in order to solve
those things sometimes the engineer got
to swoop in and save
the day even though sometimes it took
them maybe two or three times to come up
with an engineer with an idea that
actually worked and in the real world
I watched several documentaries growing
up about the dawn of the Space Age when
a lot of them included montages with
rocket after rocket exploding and
veering off course and falling to the
ground and even though those experiences
were really painful for everybody
involved at the very least it meant
weeks or months if not years of work
going up in smoke every time they
encountered a failure they learn
something that they could use to adjust
what they were doing and incorporate
that into their design and try again and
try again and try again until eventually
they started having successes early on
its goal I graduated from high school
I went to the University of Kentucky to
study mechanical engineering which I
hoped was going to be the first step on
a path to having a career in the
aerospace industry I was very fortunate
to learn a full scholarship that
required me to keep a 3.3 GPA now I was
a pretty good student in high school I
did work really hard but a lot of things
came easily to me so I think that made
me a little bit complacent in my
freshman semester at the University of
Kentucky they had this great program
where they wanted to take incoming
scholarship students and kind of give us
a scared-straight
approach to make sure that we didn’t
veer off track from being all on our own
for the first time and partying too hard
or whatever so they actually had a
student from the previous year
that had slipped below the
three-point-three average and was on
probation and just had one semester to
pull his grades up come and talk to us
and it turns out that I knew this guy he
had gone to high school with me and I
had wondered like you do about the
graduating seniors what had happened to
him and everybody else well he came and
told us a story of how he partied too
hard he wasn’t paying enough attention
in classes his grades fell and now he
was in this horrifying position where he
had to work extra hard to drag his GPA
up and not lose his scholarship and I
knew what was going on here right they
wanted to bring kids who were just like
us to give us a story and then
everything would be good for all the
rest of us
made perfect sense it resonated with me
I listen to a story but I think my
overwhelming reaction was yeah but I’m a
great student this is not gonna be me
inter chemistry one now all of this
incoming profession knew that chemistry
one was considered to be a difficult
weed out class it was taught in a large
lecture hall just like this one and it
was just really hard now me and
chemistry had never really been friends
in high school and instead of heeding
the warning of knowing this is a weed
out class hearing the warning from the
student that talked to us i sat in the
back of the class like I talked to my
friend I did the crossword puzzle I
didn’t go to class all the time and and
as you can imagine I wasn’t doing great
I could tell with the quizzes on the way
through that all was not going well
however I assumed that there was going
to be a curve you know everybody’s
having a hard time in this class it
probably won’t be too bad somehow
magically everything was just going to
work out okay well at the end of the
semester when they were mailing grades
home I was out of town and so my mom
called me to tell me the news and I can
still hear her opening the envelope on
the other side of the phone I can hear
the silence as I imagined her scanning
over the document and she says to me in
very serious tones okay Tracy there’s
good news and there’s bad news what do
you want first
and I’m like well I’ll tell me the bad
news we’ll save the good news for later
okay bad news first bad news first and
she said you know the class you were
worried you were gonna get a C in well
you got a D Wow
and I just had this moment of sheer
panic when I realized that I was that
guy I was turning into that cautionary
tale who’d be like talking to the
students the next time coming in and you
know don’t do it I was it right
horrifying but after a moment she said
but good news is you got an A and
everything else are you just barely
squeaked in the three point three to
eight and I felt just like I had
snatched my hand back from a hot stove
fast enough to get a blister without
doing myself more damage holy cow
so that near failure really motivated me
to change my chemistry study habits
right
so I retook chemistry one the next year
I didn’t fail but come on I could do
that on my transcript a retic chemistry
one the next semester as well as
chemistry two so I could stay on
schedule and I did what you know you’re
supposed to do i sat in the front of the
class and I showed up to every class and
I took notes and I read the material
beforehand I went to office I was the
model students in chemistry at that time
and all of that extra work paid off I
got an A in chemistry one and two and I
also realized this really great silver
lining associated with this failure it
turns out at that time I don’t know if
they still do this but the University of
Kentucky allows students to retake up to
three classes and they didn’t just
average the grades together they threw
out the first grade and replace it with
the second grade so if you were to look
back at my transcripts now it looked
like I got a 4.0 my freshman year like I
was just hot stuff but this whole
experience really let me see that I
wasted a lot of time I could have taken
in the lesson that was taught by that
student paid attention in class and not
had to go through the horror of doing it
the hard way so after graduating from
the University of Kentucky I did much
better for the rest of my time there in
case you were wondering I went to
Georgia Tech to get my master’s degree
in mechanical engineering and I went on
to land a job working for NASA at the
Jet Propulsion Laboratory here in
Pasadena California and I was embedded
early on as a systems engineer working
on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
project now if you’re not familiar with
that role a systems engineers job is to
work very closely with people who are
specialists in a variety of areas around
a spacecraft or a project like
propulsion and thermal and flight
software or ground data systems and
navigation all of that jazz and ensure
that all of those things were being
designed in a way that they were going
to come together smoothly and work in
order to accomplish the overall mission
goals so as a brand-new engineer
every person I talked to knew a ton more
than I did so it was hard not to feel a
little bit useless some of the time most
of the time I’ll kind of all the time
when I first started working and the
thing that was great is I realized that
at the lab the more senior engineers
actually appreciated when junior
engineers asked questions about
something that would drive a deeper
discussion about the work that we were
doing those of you who are students if
you can imagine or a member of time when
you were tutoring another student in a
subject that you were more comfortable
in than they were they might ask you a
question and you would know the answer
but maybe you’d go off and do a little
bit of digging and come back with a more
complete answer and that way you both
wind up with a more nuanced
understanding of why the answer was what
it was so you’re bringing value to the
student but they’re also being value to
you and helping you hone your
understanding in something so similarly
and the work that we do when an engineer
any engineer even a junior one asks a
question about something or why we’re
doing something the way we are
it can cause the more experienced
experts to reassess what we’re doing and
maybe ultimately change something when
you’re trying to develop complicated
spacecraft and instruments and send them
out to explore our new planets we’re
really stretching the bounds of
technology and applying techniques to
brand new and different mission designs
so questioning given assumptions about
how we’re doing things is a great way to
ensure we’re incorporating changes
appropriately along the way and not just
stagnating in our methods I also learned
a lot about the NASA lessons learned
database which is a way that we try to
make sure we share the lessons that are
learned by engineers so you don’t just
learn from the issues and problems you
bump into along the way that would be
expensive reinventing the wheel in space
every time Wow
so we like to gather the knowledge from
people working on a variety of different
missions and keep them in a place where
we can get to them actually you any
member of the public can go to this
website right there and look at the
contents of the Loven lessons learned
database and it includes a broad array
of issues that were that cropped up
along many many years and
the engineers have described what
happened and how they resolved the issue
and also generalized lessons that can be
extracted from that and applied to more
missions going forward it is a really
big solar system out there when we send
spacecraft like the Mars Reconnaissance
Orbiter to Mars or Juno to Jupiter we’re
sending them tremendously far away for
example the earth is 93 million miles
away from the Sun and that is a big
distance when we say things like million
this billion that your brain doesn’t
really do anything with that number but
if you were to drive a 93 million mile
line at a hundred miles an hour it would
take you a hundred and six years to
reach the end Mach one here on the earth
at sea level is 760 miles an hour that
would still take you nearly 14 years to
reach the end now we communicate with
our spacecraft using electromagnetic
waves that travel at the speed of light
light zips along at 670 million miles
per hour now we’re talking but it still
takes an appreciable eight minutes and
19 seconds for light to travel 93
million miles now when we’re
communicating with our spacecraft from
the earth sometimes the earth is on the
other side of the Sun from Mars and
Jupiter Mars is farther away from the
Sun than the earth is Jupiter is farther
still when they’re on when the earth is
over here and these planets are on this
side the longest one-way light time
distance tomorrow’s can be as much as 24
minutes and the longest one-way light
time all the way out to Jupiter it can
be as much as 50 minutes over 50 minutes
and so we really cannot just joystick
those pace crafts while they’re out
there we have to make sure they can take
care of themselves and in an in
time-sensitive situations where we can’t
just send them commands and tell them
what to do so we spend a tremendous
amount of time trying to go through all
of the horrible scenarios we can come up
with for things that could go wrong and
anticipating them for example this is
one of the kinds of tools that we use
this is called a well this isn’t it I’ll
show you what it’s it’s called a mission
fault tree where we try to take a very
critical event in the mission like
launch for example if
does not go right it is game over for
everyone and we take lunch and we say
well let’s break that down into all the
major things that could go wrong to make
lunch not be successful
for example maybe your spacecraft is not
producing power or it’s losing power or
something in a temperature sense
component is getting way too hot or
getting way too cold maybe you don’t
have a communications link with a
spacecraft maybe you’re not even on the
right trajectory and so on and so on we
think of all those big major things that
could go wrong and then we’ll take each
one and expand it out well why aren’t
you producing power well maybe my solar
arrays did not deploy when they were
stowed up on the launch vehicle maybe
they’re deployed but they’re not
producing power and so on and so forth
and then you take each one of those like
say well I didn’t your solar arrays
deploy well maybe the latches that hold
it shut when you’re on the launch
vehicle just didn’t release well maybe
that release but then you had a hinge
that seized up well maybe the hinge was
doing just fine but you had a damper
that froze and maybe the damper was fine
but and so on it’s on you get the idea
lots and lots of things and we keep
going and do that for every branch and
sub branch and sub branch and so on and
so on hundreds of items for each of
these major events that you might want
to choose and when we get down to the
things that are like the leaves on the
end for each one of those we say well
how do we either prevent that thing from
happening like say and our last valve
and on our damper issue we’re never
gonna let anything get anywhere near
cold enough for a damper to freeze okay
and that or you make the spacecraft be
capable of dealing with it even if it
does happen like in the last valve in
the last example maybe you have two pyro
valves that will fire and only one of
them needs to fire for the whole thing
to let go and then for each one of those
things we figure out a way to prove to
ourselves that that either robustness or
prevention is going to work by doing
some analysis or some tests or some
inspection and so on and so on this is
an incredible amount of work but it’s
important because once our spacecraft is
hundreds of millions of miles from us
you can’t go whack it with a wrench and
make something
so we have to do all of this stuff up
front this is just one of the many ways
we try to go about problem proofing our
spacecraft but we know from decades of
experience that no matter how much
analysis you do no matter how much
design tweaking you do chances are good
just because of the sheer novelty of
what we’re doing that everything is not
going to go exactly according to plan
but the idea is if we spend this much
time beating down on all the issues we
can possibly think of the ones that slip
through our hopefully ones that we can
just deal with in flight so this is
going to be example from my recent
experience on the genome mission now
Juno launched in 2011 on his way to
Jupiter and it took a big looping
pathway out beyond the orbit of Mars
looping back in by the earth in 2013 in
order to get a gravity assist we needed
the earth flyby in order to increase the
acceleration of the spacecraft enough to
get all the way out to Jupiter three
years later in July 2016 now the earth
flyby event is not critical in the same
way that launch is because we did all of
the final trajectory correction
maneuvers weeks and months in advance to
set the spacecraft up on his path to do
the flyby so at that point it was really
all just physics now we were doing some
things with the spacecraft like turning
instruments on and allowing them an
opportunity to take data from the earth
as a practice run for when we finally
got all the way out to Jupiter so we
were we were interested in the
spacecraft still doing stuff and on the
day of Earth flyby
we knew that the spacecraft was going to
go on a path that took it behind the
earth with respect to the Sun where we
going into the Earth’s shadow and we
knew that we planned for it we designed
for it we did analysis to make sure
nothing on the space rock was going to
get too cold when it’s here in the
shadow we made sure we had enough energy
in the battery because the spacecraft
would be just relying on its battery
there’d be no Sun on their Ray’s to
produce power I also knew that Juno was
based largely on Mars Reconnaissance
Orbiter heritage on that spacecraft at
Mars it goes into the Mars shadow with
back to the Sun every couple of hours
every orbit and the hardware has always
worked just fine on Juno this was going
to be our only time passing into the
shadow of a planet after launch we
designed the orbit so that when we got
all the way out of Jupiter if you guys
are the Sun the spacecraft is orbiting
this way so it would always have Sun on
the erase one of the things we do at the
lab in order to make sure we spread the
knowledge around of things that people
have learned on other projects is have
engineers on a mission present our plans
for major events like this to very
senior engineers and managers at the lab
in order to ask them for their advice
and suggestions on other things we
should do or think about before we
actually go do this event so we
presented presented all our plans and
all our details people gave us plenty of
suggestions things to go look at but one
of them also reiterated the fact that
this is a unique event in your mission
you need to really be careful about it
look at everything with with critical
eyes double-check triple-check we
totally agreed we’ve already done that
but we went back and did it again we
looked at our analysis some more we did
a couple of additional cases everything
looked fine and in my mind the hardware
was designed to do this the analysis was
showing that it was fine everything was
checking out we were gonna be testing
the sequences so we were good to go I’m
a day of Earth flyby we had our whole
operations team in our to Mission
Support areas it was a very exciting day
it’s always exciting when big things are
happening and we even had this really
cool outreach event going on where ham
radio operators all across the world
were sending a synchronized high signal
to the spacecraft that we would be able
to pick up with one of our instruments
and then tell the world later we heard
you when we were going by super cute
right so it was really exciting the
whole world was watching and we were all
in this together waiting for the
spacecraft to go by and it’s last close
close past the earth before it headed
out on its way all the way out to
Jupiter and so on that day we all have
our eyes glued to the telemetry
everything is going picture-perfect tick
tick tick all the way through we were
getting near the point where we were
gonna go across the day/night terminator
and the spacecraft was heading into the
darkness and everything was still going
fine
it went picture-perfect until it got
about 12 minutes into the 19 minute
Eclipse and then the spacecraft was
monitoring its internal power state it
hit a limit that we told it to respond
to and turn all the instruments off and
turned it and headed back to earth and
sent the message that something was
wrong with it
my thought was you have got to be
kidding and we looked at this so many
times how did we miss how did I miss
this now the first thing you’re
concerned about when something like this
is happening is is the spacecraft
healthy and safe and happily we could
see in the telemetry that it was but we
needed to wait until we got all the data
down so we can figure out exactly what
had happened and it was a long and
complicated story but it boils down to a
few things number one there was a little
bit of a design change between MRO and
Juno and the power system which wasn’t
being quite reflected in the traditional
way we were still doing the power
analysis on the ground and there was a
little conflation between how we chose
the initial starting battery charge
level and the level that we had
programmed it to respond spacecraft are
only gonna do what you tell them to do
right so this whole thing kicked off a
long investigation for us and an
improvement of our power analysis
process and the silver lining of that is
we spent a lot more time and effort on
that than we might have if earth flyby
had gone completely fine and if we had
decided much later in the game to do a
major upgrade to our power analysis
process we would have been trying to do
that piled on top of all the other work
we were doing to get ready for our
arrival at Jupiter and all the other
stuff we’ve been learning since we got
in orbit so that wound up being a great
silver lining and the big takeaway for
me was it’s really hard to spot tiny
nuance problems in the back of your mind
subconsciously you really think there’s
nothing wrong but if you can switch your
perspective convince yourself there is a
problem and you have to find it then you
can bring that laser focus to what
you’re doing now the problem is you
can’t spend ten thousand hours on ten
thousand tiny little insignificant
issues most of which are unlikely but
you have to find the way to focus in on
the ones that matter and thinking about
new different unique events is usually a
pretty good place to start
so for me I’ve been working at the lab
for 17 years I’ve had the fortune of
working on three different flight
missions Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter
Kepler and Juno and what I’ve learned is
that it’s those issues you bump into
along the way that teach you the best
lesson these are the ways that we as
engineers grow into more experienced
veterans and are more able to recognize
and predict potential issues in the
future last thing I wanted to leave you
with is this a lot of people think that
the path to success means you make the
wrong turn and you wind up at failure or
you make the right turn and you wind up
at success but in my experience and I
think we’ve heard a lot here today the
right path to success typically leads
right through failure as evidenced by
this failure leads you to learn a lot of
things that help get you over the
obstacles in your way towards success so
the next time you have an unpleasant
unfortunate event happen to you please
resist the urge to put it behind you
close your eyes to it and never speak of
it again that would be such a waste it’s
already happened so you might as well
pull it in close and peel away all the
layers and get every last ounce of
knowledge you can get out of it because
those are the things that are gonna help
you on your path to success thank you
you
[Applause]
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