of sources including newspapers and transcripts from the hearings in the House of Representatives, Tim Sutherland (S.M. ’09) created the stakeholder map for the NASA Earth Observation Program, which contains dozens of stakeholders and hundreds of flows. Thus, stakeholder analysis provides an assessment of the relative importance of different scientific disciplines represented by their corresponding “panels” in the Decadal Survey. The campaign-level science traceability matrix takes the output of the stakeholder analysis, a set of panel weights, and traces this value back into objectives, measurements, instruments and finally missions. Hence, this tool allows a systematic comparison of the relative importance of heterogeneous instruments and missions in the Decadal Survey. Based on careful reading of the NRC report and data from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Theo Seher (S.M.’09) developed this simple and powerful tool, which has since been used to generate inputs for scheduling and packaging models. Launched in 2002, the European Space Agency’s Envisat is the largest Earth observation satellite ever built. With 10 instruments and a mass of more than eight metric tons, it is expected to operate at least until 2013. This type of huge multi-instrument platform is of great use to scientists as it facilitates data cross-registration between instruments. However, multiple interferences among instruments made the development of this satellite an engineering nightmare. (NASA image)
The packaging tool takes a set of instruments as an input and explores different assignments of instruments into satellites. In other words, the tool compares architectures using small satellites carrying few instruments, with larger multi-instrument platforms. The flagship example of a large scientific observatory containing multiple instruments is the Envisat satellite. Because of scientific synergies among measurements, some of the instruments are great candidates for sharing a common satellite platform, thus achieving lifecycle cost reductions. Other instruments are less compatible for a variety of reasons such as electromagnetic, optical, mechanical, or thermal interference between instruments or very
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AEROASTRO 2009-2010