Projects for the International Space Station Keeping Me Busy

I did a web chat on Thursday, April 2, from noon until about 1:00. I had every intention of being on time, but of course I was late by about two minutes. I was running through the building saying, "I've got to get to my computer!" I had bookmarked where I needed to go to sign-on to chat, but in my rush I had forgotten and signed on to the Neuron web site as a user. I had to call the person I had coordinated the chat with and they reminded me about the bookmark. So I was about five minutes late altogether. I was so embarrassed, but the web chat finally began and we had several schools and a couple of other people join the discussion. I think one of them was from Sweden, and when they signed off they were going to bed. (It was late morning here.) A few times I was asked questions I wasn't sure of the answers (like the name of the Mars Rover), but other people came on with the answer. It was cool -- definitely interactive! I had such a neat time. It was so much fun and I'd love to do it again.

Now that my work for Neurolab is finished, I am working on other projects. One of my projects is to repackage a Ku-Band receiver into one of the SIR drawers (see my bio). It works with the International Space Station (ISS) Space to Ground Transmitter Receiver Controller to receiver and convert signals - radio frequency, bandwidth, etc. Since I'm a mechanical engineer, I don't understand how it works too well, but I do have experience as to repackaging it into the SIR drawer.. The receiver is being used for video-teleconferencing (video link) to communicate with the astronauts on the ISS.

The team I work on ordered these receivers from a company in Florida. After we received them, we needed to check them out. We tested them over in ESTL (Electronics Systems Test Laboratory) in Building 44, on site at JSC. During the testing, we realized we weren't receiving one of the signals correctly. This didn't make the receiver unusable, but we were expecting to be able to receive, among others, this particular signal. We thought we were going to have to send them back to be fixed -- this all takes time -- making the project behind in the schedule. One of our young engineers began checking the receiver and realized that the receivers were getting the signal we were looking for but the receiver's connection panel was mislabeled -- something we didn't know. We are going to fix the labels on the receivers we have, so this will save a lot of time. Since we are getting two more of these receivers, we requested that the labeling be corrected for the connectors.

In addition to Ku-Band, I'm also working another ISS (we call it "Station") project which is the Human Research Facility. HRF is a rack of hardware full of medical equipment like mass spectrometer, ultrasound imaging system, body mass measurement device, and a really cool computer workstation with awesome capabilities. These individual hardware developments are within my organization (or group) and I manage them all. My title for this project is Payload Project Manager.

I've also been working on my part of the budget for the next fiscal year for my projects on the ISS (Ku-Band Receiver and HRF). This can be difficult and is usually boring. It's like trying to figure out how much of your weekly allowance you have to save to have enough to buy a pair of rollerblades at the end of the year. You don't know if they're going on sale or if they'll stop making the pair you want now. It's just hard to estimate everything that could happen on a project in a whole year's time.

A major difference between HRF and Neurolab is that for Neurolab we were developing hardware according to the scientists specifications. We knew the research before starting the hardware. HRF is a "generic facility", so hardware is built before the scientists get involved with specific experiments. We received some general guidelines from the group of scientists supporting HRF, but not directly from the principal investigators doing an actual experiment.. Although it's different from the philosophy we used in the past, it's not a bad way of doing it,. We should be done building our HRF hardware within the next eight months.