Day 151/365: Actual JUICE mission hardware!

[nanila]

Picture of a metal box with frames for PCBs (printed circuit boards).

I realise this may not be the most thrilling photo ever, but I'm not ashamed to say that I almost cried when I saw this metal box. This box represents 18 months' worth of work on my part (and others', but a lot of it was on me to coordinate) to get A Certain Space Agency to approve our soldering qualification plan for our flight electronics for the JUICE mission. The existence of this box means that we have been allowed to manufacture actual physical hardware rather than just endlessly iterating on bits of paperwork describing the hardware. It's not just spreadsheets and Word documents any more! There is a METAL BOX, and we will Put Things Into It, and heat them up and freeze them repeatedly, and shake the box around violently to ensure that bits don't fall off of it.

I may shed tears when the PCBs arrive and we can put them into the frames.

METAL BOOOOOX \m/