ESA Is "Stress-Testing" The "Juice" Ground Ops Team -- With Simulated Glitchy Runs...

ESA's Juice craft, now awaiting a launch date in French Guiana, at the space port, will carry a state-of-the-art science payload comprising remote sensing, geophysical and in situ instruments. These geophysics instruments will explore the Jovian moons’ surfaces and subsurfaces, probe the atmospheres of Jupiter and its moons, and measure their gravitational pulls... once launched. [At right are the officers running the simulation, throwing new computer generated glitches at the team --minute by minute.]

But first, it is time to pressure test the ground team -- in the unlikely event multiple issues are encountered at once. [NASA runs much the same on every pre mission in the final weeks before liftoff.] Here's the story in full, from that gleaming new HQ in Paris:

. . .Recovering a spacecraft from [simulated multiple systems and mechanical failures] is exhausting; they must get to the root of the problem, reboot the central computer and power-off several units, all with low visibility on the state of the spacecraft. It takes a lot of work to get back to nominal operations.

As the team tries to get to the root of Juice's issues, the Simulations Officers below continue commanding the simulator, listening in on their responses and watching how they handle these complex, unideal scenarios.

“One of our primary goal is to unite the team, and one of the several ways we do it is by uniting them against us,” says Filipe Metelo, Deputy Sim Officer for Juice.

“For this simulation, we really wanted to test the two teams’ ability to handle errors as they arise just before a handover, to test how they communicate what has happened to the next team who will be taking over a mission in distress. . . .”

So. . . now you know. . . the right stuff, indeed!

Out, grinning. . . .



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