Blueshift - March 1, 2010

First Light, Last Paycheck

[music]

Maggie: Hi, I'm Maggie Masetti and welcome to our March 1, 2010  episode
of Blueshift, the podcast from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

There are few fields in which completing your job successfully also means
that you no longer have one.   Such is the case sometimes here at NASA
where projects come and go. It's the nature of working on spacecraft and
instruments that can have short lifespans. The passage of a few years can
mean that it's time to start looking for something else to transition to.

However, the Hubble Space Telescope has been one of the longest running
satellite programs and some people have spent their entire careers working
on it.   Not only that, but it was a mission that often called for
specialized skills, which may or may not translate to the world outside of
Hubble. The last mission to service it was completed (successfully) just
last May, and the end of an era is clearly in sight.

To find out what happens when a major project winds down, we talked to a
few Goddard people who were involved in different aspects of Hubble, from
support science, to systems engineering, to working with the astronaut's
tools, to actually managing the spacewalks for last year's Servicing
Mission 4, or as it's known at NASA, SM4. 

Mark Jarosz has been involved with Hubble for a number of years.  He
started out during Servicing missions 3A and 3B as the carrier manager,
that is, managing how the new hardware and instruments were carried up to
space and the old returned to earth.  He left the project after that but
was brought back on for SM4 in a different, very vital role.

Mark: I was the Hubble EVA manager, and EVA being for Extra Vehicular
Activity, basically was responsible for working with the astronaut crew at
Johnson and the trainers at Johnson to familiarize the astronauts with the
repair mission and the tasks that they would have to perform during an EVA.

That was across the board. Every time the astronaut had to do a spacewalk,
any activity he had to do, we worked with Johnson to put together the
choreography and the Éuh develop the tools and procedures to do that.

There was some question of what you would go do afterwards because Goddard
is not really aÉ working with the astronauts/training them with the
astronauts other than Hubble.  I did have a concern for the Lockheed team
that worked for me, as well as the crew aids and tools group, which was
developing the tools for the astronauts. So that was kinda a couple of
unique jobs on Hubble that there wasn't actually a niche at Goddard for
that to fill.

Maggie: Justin Cassidy and Jackie Johnson were two of the people that
worked on the astronaut's tools. Justin has worked on every servicing
mission except the first one and he played a very important role during
Servicing Mission 4. 

Justin: I was the lead system engineer for the CATS. The CATS are the Crew
Aids and Tools, basically the tools that the astronauts use to make a
servicing mission happen for Hubble.

Maggie: Jackie Johnson worked on Hubble for 14 years. For SM4, he was the
lead EVA liason for the EVA group to the carriers group. 

Jackie: Our group was responsible for basically packaging up and hauling
up all of the tools and equipment and instruments that the astronauts used
to service Hubble. The tool guys would provide us with the tools and we'd
find a way to package it, put it in a box, and carry it up there. Keep it
warm, keep it safe, until the astronauts were ready to use it.

Maggie: Since Jackie and Justin appeared to have very specialized jobs, we
wondered about concerns for job prospects post-SM4.

Jackie:  I think anybody who worked in the EVA world, the extravehicular
activities, may have had that concern. Because if you were really
entrenched in EVA, well there's not a whole lot of other EVA work, with
the exception of space station now. And if you're not somehow tied to
space station, you're not going to have a whole lot else to do.

Justin: Maybe it was not talked about. Everyone was extremely focused on
our servicing mission. It was the absolutely the most challenging mission,
the most jam packed, but in the end, the most rewarding project to work
on. I'm sure other people were very, you know, in the back of their mind,
concerned about what am I doing next, but there was such focus to make the
mission happen that there was not a lot of talk about what's your next
move going on.

Maggie: Kevin Boyce spent around 20 months as the systems engineer for the
repair of the Advanced Camera for Surveys or ACS.  Though he was a
relative newcomer to the project, Kevin was no less affected as the
project neared completion.

Kevin: There were, yeah, there were a lot of people who I don't think knew
where they were going to end up next.  For many people it had been 15, 20,
25 years that they had been doing that kind of thing. And yeah, it was
going to be, at the very least, a big change to a whole different culture
with whatever they were going to do next. 

It was a little bittersweet sometimes, knowing that you're done, but it
was, as the guy who hired me as a systems engineer called it, the last
ride out of Dodge.

Maggie: Eliot Malumuth has worked supporting a number of Hubble related
instruments, including the Wide Field Camera 3.  He was able to transition
from one Hubble-related project to another. But post Servicing Mission 4,
he was faced with trying to figure out what was next.

Eliot: I was very worried. From what I was hearing, I knew that work for
WFC3 would extend a little bit beyond launchÉbut, you know, it kept
looking like it was 3 months or maybe it was 6 months, or maybe it was
part time.... and so I was, I was definitely worried about it. You know,
my supervisor was committed to try to find some other work here for me,
but even though he said he was working on it and things, I was worried
Ôcause all the things seemed little and not something that would make up a
full-time job for maybe more than a year.

Maggie:  Job uncertainties aside, for most, the launch of STS-125 was the
culmination of years of hard work.  For some, the work was just beginning!
 
Kevin: It was great going down for the launch. I got to go down for the
final walkdown in the shuttle. So the shuttle on the pad with a big clean
room up against it with the bay doors open. And I got to go up there and
look at it and see the big box, inside of which was another box, inside of
which was the stuff I made and look at it and say Òoh yes, everything
looks fine to meÓ.  I had a moment there when I was looking at it and
thinking, ÒWait a minute, this isn't a simulator, this is the real thing!
This stuff is going to be up in space and John Grunsfeld and Drew Feustal
are going to be out there putting together the things that I've built and
putting them on the Hubble!Ó And that was an energizing moment.

Justin: I had a great week. We have what we call our systems walkdown,
where a core group of our systems engineers go down there and we get to
inspect the cargo bay, then make sure all of our equipment is packed in
and look at the launch vehicle before they actually shut the cargo bay
doors.   So, that was one day. The next day they started to shut the doors
and I got to see the doors closed. I had never seen that before, and I
thought that was really fantastic.

Jackie: The knowledge that you've got friends, in this case you know, the
astronauts who were on board, we'd worked directly with them for so long.
Knowing that they were onboard, it always gives you that little bit of a
lump in your throat when you see it go up. It's always exciting watching
something that you've spent so many years working on, and then to see it
go up and to see it actually unfold - it's extremely exciting.

Mark: Watching Hubble launchÉ it was extremely exciting. A lot of work,
hard work, went into preparing for it. However, having launched spacecraft
- usually at that point, my job is done.  And being the EVA manager with
Hubble, you watch the shuttle launch, and you know, you watch it for those
couple minutes and it's like, oh, this is fantastic. And then reality sets
in that, wait a minute, I got to get on a plane and head to Houston,
because this job isn't over. You got another, you know, 12, 13 days
mission in front of you with 5 very difficult EVAs. So my excitement
didn't really come until the end of the 5th EVA day, when they got
everything done on the telescope and we got a thumbs up that not only did
we complete 100% of our objectives, but we completed about 110% and that
everything was working. So that night is when I had my celebration.

Eliot: Thrilling and nerve-wracking. There were things that happened which
could have kept Wide Field Camera 3 from going into the telescope! Until
the astronauts push the telescope overboard and return home and everything
is working, there's still a little bit of worry about it. The real pay off
is that some amazing science is being done and a lot of it has to do with
how good the detectors are, and in particular the IR detectors. That's a
lot of what I worked on with the testing of the detectors and pushing the
technology to make them better and better, and they got to the point where
they can now do this amazing science, so that's really gratifying.

Maggie:  In the end, thanks to the hard work of the Hubble team, the
tricky repair of Hubble's instruments was successful.  The science results
show that the immediate future of Hubble is no longer in question.  But
what happened to Mark, Justin, Jackie, Kevin, and Eliot?  Did their Hubble
skills translate to something else at NASA? Were they able to move on to
something new, or did Hubble's first light essentially signal their last
paychecks?  

Kevin was lucky and had a job waiting for him with a group he'd worked
with before.

Kevin: Well, right now, I'm working on ASTRO-H, which is a Japanese
mission. It's an X-ray astronomy satellite. ASTRO-H is going to launch in
2014. It's a more normal length program compared to what I did on Hubble,
which was 3 years of work crammed into a year an a half.

Maggie: Mark Jarosz has changed projects every few years, so in a way,
this was just one more transition.

Mark: I don't know where everyone has gone on Hubble. I know some people
have retired. Some people have left to go do other things. Project
manager, Frank Ceppolina, he's been trying to develop and keep that
servicing capability alive, and doing some studies for mission on space
station. Those people are still working in that area. Not so much EVA, but
development of tools and robotic capability for maybe the possibility of
servicing Hubble again in the future robotically, or some technical
capabilities on space station. For me, I had done a bunch of other
programs here at Goddard along the lines of spacecraft, so I wasn't
exactly worried that I could have a problem transitioning back into the
mainstream of what Goddard does.

Maggie: Justin Cassidy and his engineers were ready for new challenges.

Justin: We are engineers, so engineers do engineering stuff. So we kind of
have to reinvent ourselves.  All of us were really at the top of our game.
I mean, we had been studying for years what to do, we created unique
tools. To go through the development, the testing, manifesting, getting
the tool up in orbit, watching the crew member over his shoulder do the
work. Extremely rewarding. And it's like, the high is the high, because it
all worked out in the end.  What we're doing after the mission, we've been
going around showing our tools to other folks. We've had a lot of visitors
here at Goddard. So we have a great technology, great engineering base
here to show what we can do.  Kind of promoting ourselves for future work.
We've been servicing Hubble, and now we're just going to shift gears and
figure out, how can we service other satellites that are up in space. 

Maggie: Jackie Johnson, who works with Justin, also had to transition from
working on spacewalks.

Jackie: I'm working with a smaller core group, from the Hubble group.
We're working on, going back to station, but not in an EVA capacity. It's
more robotics demonstration capacity, showing what we can do robotically
to refuel a geosynchronous satellite.

Maggie: Eliot Malumuth managed to pull together enough tasks for a
full-time job, including some residual work on Hubble.

Eliot: Right now, I'm still a little bit on the Wide Field Camera 3
detector testing. ÔCause there are still some properties of the dectors
that we can test in the lab,  aren't so easily tested in orbit. My primary
task now is with the optics group for the ISIM, which is the Integrated
Science Instrument Module of the James Webb Space Telescope, which is a
big project hereÉ

Maggie: In the end, working where we do can be, as Kevin said,
bittersweet. The satisfaction of accomplishment is often followed by the
question of Òwhat's nextÓ.  And after seeing the level of dedication  that
went into making this Hubble Servicing Mission successful, perhaps the
bigger question is, can what's next match what's done and gone? 

Jackie: I think the bigger thing for me is, looking back, how anything top
what we did on Hubble SM4? It was just a phenomenal, exciting mission. It
was great. Honestly, I think it's true probably for most people, you know,
going on to whatever that next thing is. It's kind of hard to reach the
same level of excitement as what we experienced.

Maggie: And with that thought from Jackie Johnson, we'll leave you for
now.  But be sure to check out  our website, we have some photos of actual
space hardware from Hubble that Justin Cassidy showed us when we
interviewed him. We also have a few video clips.   Our website is
universe.nasa.gov/blueshift.  We also love chatting with listeners on
twitter - you can find us there as @NASAblueshift. We'll see you in a
couple weeks with a new podcast.This is Maggie Masetti bringing the
universe closer to you, with Blueshift.