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Did you hear that? September 14, 2007

Posted by spacemom in : She Blinded me with Science , 2 comments

That sound? That was the sound of my ass being kicked by mono. Again.

I thought that I was done with this. I have felt good lately. As in, I can exercise and not need to go to bed before the kids good. But this week has been tough. My science team has been working hard on a plan to turn off a heater on our instrument. A friend of mine mentioned that it was odd to imagine needing heaters in space. Yes, spacecraft often have heaters. Space is damn cold. We have designed a test to turn off the heater to measure the time it takes to cool. We have everything in place. However, a common phrase where I work is "Plan for the unexpected".

This is what I have been doing this week. It started last Thursday. I wrote the engineering requests to run the tests. My boss and I worked out the timings based on the communication times with the spacecraft. Then we submitted the requests and reviewed the spacecraft command load. In addition to this, we spent Friday and Sunday, writing contingency plans. What would we do if…? If the heater failed to come on? If the instrument cooled too quickly? Etc… So most of my week has been spent working on the contingency actions. We realized that we might have to do something fairly drastic and spent a great deal of time discussing this. We worked out three cases of "failure". We debated the difference between an anomaly vs a failure.

Today, my boss and I spent 1 hour discussing with a group of flight managers and mission planners and a flight director the plans. And we worked on it. Hard. We were questioned. We explained everything. We went down the path of "what if…" we didn’t do the drastic thing. And we decided to follow the basic plan that we had decided on.

This saga ended around 1:30. I was able to go and get lunch. This was the third day in a row that I worked through lunch. While I usually don’t do this, I spent this week for the spacecraft. So imagine my surprise when I returned home today to realize my ass was kicked by mono. The symptoms are coming back. The ones that really killed me early on this summer. I have been ordered by Jay to get to bed. 

So, the spacecraft is killing me. Slowly slowly…it is coming to get me!

BAH!