Sauntering Vaguely Downward

It occurred to me recently that a decade or so of working in and around space science has allowed me to amass an interesting collection of swag. The swag lives in, on and around my desk, depending on size, current relevance and preciousness.

One item that rocketed to the top of the list (and thus currently holds pride of place) was a gift I received at the end of my service at Space Camp in Austria in July. It is a piece of Genuine Space Rock. Observe its Certificate of Authenticity, which is lent additional gravitas (at least to me) by virtue of being in German.


[Image of Asteroid belt detritus]

Next time: pin badges galore!

[The 2014 Alpbach Space Summer School participants. Photo not mine - pinched from Paxi the ESA mascot's home page. I made this picture a bit bigger than I normally do for posted photos. Can you see me?]

I missed a day of posting. This was a tactical mistake, as a day in Alpbach time is more like a week in terms of eventfulness. I'm up super-early on Wednesday morning in order to catch up, as today will be more of the same. The four student teams have until midnight tonight to hand in their final reports and presentations, after which neither can be altered. They go before the jury tomorrow and the winners are announced at Thursday's dinner.

Fished from what now feels like the dark recesses of distant memory, Day 7.

Monday began with the last set of lectures. These were rather thinly attended compared to the previous week, as around half of each team decided to skip them in favour of preparing for the preliminary design review. I found this a bit sad as the lectures were quite good. The first lecture was given by a very prominent French scientist, who, despite his habit of muttering through his beard, gave a rather beautifully structured overview of the last fifty-odd years of space exploration of the terrestrial planets (including the Moon). The slides were so good I've pinched them and asked permission to use some of them for future outreach talks. The penultimate and final lectures were given by a nearly as prominent but very shy German scientist, who talked about the outer planet's moons and the study of exoplanets. I was pleasantly surprised later to learn that the students found these inspiring, since neither of them were helpful in an immediate sense for their mission design for this school.

During the coffee break, our school's photographer took the group photo above, which (I believe) has been sent to the ISS. Alexander Gerst, the German astronaut currently aboard the space station, is an alumnus of the Summer School and headed a team while he was here.

When the last lecture finished, the students dispersed to wolf down their lunches and continue preparing for their Preliminary Design Reviews*, which took place at 1630. I was on a review panel with a fellow roving tutor and the French lecturer from the morning. During the review, the lecturer got out his laptop and started typing. Even I found this slightly unnerving, and I wasn't the presenter. What the students would've found even more unnerving is that he wasn't answering e-mail or even updating his Facebook status. Oh no. He was correcting their orbit calculations. With hindsight, we probably did the review in reverse order. We (said lecturer and I) began by giving them a lot of critical feedback, which was positively phrased, but also probably didn't help their nervousness. This is a fault of mine. I tend to jump straight into problem-solving. The third juror, a quiet and lovely man, didn't speak until we were nearly finished. He praised them both for the strength and originality of their scientific idea and for the quality of their presentation. This was good because it bolstered their confidence, on top of making them realise how much work they still had to do.

We dashed back to the hotel after the review for our tutor meeting at 18:00. The feedback was largely positive apart from one team. Flushed with the success of their requirements review (the one that I had attended on Day 4), they presented only two slides much too quickly and therefore missed a step in preparing for the final presentation, which lasts an hour. All of the team tutors are invested in their teams' success, but the two tutors for this team are so much so that they're practically part of the team and they looked gutted. (If you're finding yourself distressed on their behalf, don't worry; the team and their tutors have since recovered!)

We went to dinner to find a significant proportion of the students missing (mostly from that team), since they'd decided to stay in the Schoolhouse and prepare for their delta review. It transpired that it was the birthday of one of the team tutors. Every night one representative from each team has to stand up and describe briefly the team's progress. The teams are called in random order. His team (the one that featured strongly in my early posts and has gone from having the worst to probably the best team dynamics in five days) decided to break the rules by requesting to go last, and by all standing up together and rapping a poem they'd written in his honour. It was adorable.

We returned to the Schoolhouse after dinner. The tutors finally exited after midnight. Sadly, since it was Monday we couldn't find anywhere to have a beer in honour of the birthday boy. But I wouldn't say he came off too badly, given that he now has his very own song, immortalised forever on the Summer School's Facebook page.

Extracted from the fog of my underslept brain, Day 8.

Although the church bells woke me at 7 AM, I needed to get some work done so I didn't head to the Schoolhouse until nearly 10 AM. I visited each team in turn, but they were all so intent upon their individual tasks that I just sat quietly in the rooms working unless asked a question. Having been chastised by a member of one team who thought I hadn't spent enough time with them (true, but this is because every time I went in and offered to help, no one took me up on it!), I sat in their room with parts of their engineering group for a while in the afternoon prior to the Final Design Review.

I left shortly before the review, as I was part of their review panel, along with the head of the Summer School, who is also the head of the Austrian Space Agency. (I bet that wasn't intimidating for them at all, oh no.) They did pretty well, although for some mysterious reason they still had an abundance of speakers when it's plain that they only need one - the chap whom they appointed their spokesperson on the very first day. He has all the qualities and the complete vision of the mission that a leader needs, and I think their failure to recognise it stems from the relative youth of this team. We gave them plenty of feedback on their presentation. I stressed to them that if they performed a duty cycle calculation a lot of the problems with incorrect budgets and assumptions in their presentation would magically disappear. I also (after some discussion with the team tutors, who were wary of appearing biased), returned later in the evening to suggest to them that they appoint a single spokesperson for their final presentation and hinted strongly at the identity of the person they should consider appointing. They seemed to take it well, but who knows what they will decide in the end - one of the fun things about this process is the unpredictability of the students!

* Just to give you some perspective on how accelerated this timetable is, the JUICE mission was selected in 2012. We had our first requirements review last year. We have two more reviews before PDR, which is still over a year away.

[View over my outstretched legs as I relax on a lounge chair in the hotel garden.]

Most of the students and a fair number of tutors went on alpine hikes yesterday. Given that hauling my pregnant self from the Schoolhouse to the hotel, a distance of about 400 metres at an incline of OMG STEEP, leaves me breathless in the current heat wave (30+ degrees C), I decided not to go. I spent the morning and early afternoon alternately working and resting.

Just before 16:00 I headed back to the Schoolhouse. A team tutor (science) for one of the teams had not yet returned from the hike, and their science team was in disarray. With the permission of the other (engineering) tutor, I stepped in to marshal them to order. I put all their science objectives up on the blackboard and assigned the requirements to the members of the science team according to their interests. Some of them were already working on them, but no one knew what anyone else was doing, so there were both gaps and overlaps. One of them wanted to rewrite the objectives (not just the requirements, the original science objectives). I had to give my speech again about it being far too late for that and needing to move forward because they must have a payload (and spacecraft(s) and mission scenario e.g. orbits) by Monday. They settled down to do some serious work.

Once the scientists got organised, they started putting some numbers up on the board, which gave the payload and mission (orbit) analysis teams something to work with. After dinner, the team reconvened and each scientist took it in turn to explain and defend their numbers to everyone else.

All of this took most of the afternoon and the evening and I'm deliberately glossing over the details, but it was wonderful to watch the transformation from utter chaos and despair to order and optimism. Their leader, whom it was obvious to the tutors should have been the leader from the first day, had agreed very reluctantly to do so that morning. By the evening, he was in control, with the full backing of his peers. He called for a engineering review at 12:15 AM to ensure that the payload team were getting the interpretation of the science team's requirements right, and they identified where they'd need to have discussions or rethink the need for the given measurement range or resolution given available technologies.

I'm afraid I didn't rove much as a tutor yesterday since I got caught up in this team's struggle, so my goal for today is to wander more freely!

[Sign for a bar I probably won't see the inside of on this trip, as it's only open from 10 PM to 3 AM and I can't drink - or stay vertical that late. But I like the look of it.]

(I was awakened this morning by the person upstairs who apparently couldn't figure out how to shut and lock their door when they went out for a run/swim/whatever at 6 AM. Bang! Bang! Bang! BANG! >.< Also, the baby is ill and I'm hundreds of miles away. The bloke has everything under control but it's still worrisome. Apologies, therefore, if this is less coherent than optimal.)

Despite the unnecessarily early banging-door alarm call, I was alert throughout the morning lecture session, because all three of them were extremely good. They covered Mars, Venus and Mercury geophysics in succession, and they were structured very well to spark the interest of the students in their mission design. They presented the state of known science, walked through a quick history of space-based measurement and modelling of geophysical properties, and then gave a list of unknown/desirable items that would be exciting to explore in future. We broke for lunch,after which the students returned to their four teams to begin narrowing down their options in earnest.

I spent the afternoon going from room to room, mostly observing the student discussions but occasionally being asked for information, some of it quite specific technical information about magnetometers, which worried me a bit since at this point they should not be focused on how they'll do the measurements but rather why they want to do them in the first place. I tried to steer them away from this, but it's hard, especially when they get so excited delving into the nitty gritty details.

While the teams are going through similar personnel-based challenges (e.g. Who is going to be the team leader? A: Not necessarily the person who thinks they should be...), they are taking radically different approaches to deciding their mission topic. One group, which is strangely composed entirely of shy people and barely spoke yesterday, has split into three groups and is now amongst the most animated and, I dare say, coming up with some of the most interesting science cases as a result. In contrast, another group, which had firmly decided a mission on the first day, determined that they didn't have a strong science case and had to go back to the drawing board and start again. This group also suffer from a lack of leadership but in a completely different way. There are three who want to lead and none of them are listening to each other. Or their fellow students. Or their team tutors. All three of them are fixated on their own ideas. It's a lot more difficult to manage.

By the end of the night, the teams need to have selected a target planet and written a (set of) science objective(s). Tomorrow afternoon they will go through their first design review. I get to attend one of these, because the reviews run simultaneously. I predict that we're looking at two missions to Venus and one to either Mars or Earth. I suspect they've all ruled out Mercury as too much of a challenge, given both the trajectory analysis headache and the fact that BepiColombo is going there with multiple spacecraft and a fairly comprehensive payload in 2016. But we'll see!

[Oh, you know, just some Alps in the background.]

The official opening of the 38th Austrian Space Summer School began with the ringing of an enormous cowbell at the Schoolhouse at 8:30 AM. The clanging was followed by a number of lectures, beginning with a broad overview by the head of the German space agency (DLR) and proceeding with ever-increasing specificity through a range of geophysical topics. It ended with the students finally being taken off tenterhooks when the composition of their four teams were announced and their dedicated tutors (one Science, one Engineering) assigned.

We trekked up the hill back to the hotel for drinks and dinner, which were followed by yet another lecture. Despite the deluge of information, the students are still all keyed up. Everyone of the teams is downstairs in the hotel bar (it is now 11 PM), forming working groups and discussing potential mission parameters.

Official language of the School: B.E. (Broken English)
Best lecture of the day: "Terrestrial and planetary tectonics". And I'm not just saying that because he talked about Hawai'i a lot.
Best interruption of the day: A mobile phone ringing persistently. This doesn't sound that great until you know that it turned out to be the speaker's. The director of planetary science at the DLR had to answer call from ESA in the middle of his own lecture.
(Probable) Fact of the Day: Erwin Schrödinger is buried in the graveyard of this village. I shall at some point make a little trip to his grave, so that I can collapse the wave function of my knowledge of its existence through observation of it myself.
Quote of the Day: "In space missions, it is not that failure is not an option. Failure is the default mode. You have to work extremely hard not to fail." -- spacecraft engineer

I'm in my hotel room now with my feet up, exercising the principle of Conservation of Spoons, because I know that my expertise, while not immediately required, will certainly be in demand well before the end of the next nine days.