SLS is still a national disgrace

11 pointsposted 10 hours ago
by keithly

2 Comments

floxy

10 hours ago

Since they mention the Chandra X-ray telescope defunding, I found that there are about 180 people (according to the FAQ: https://www.savechandra.org/faq) working on the project. Anyone know the breakdown of those roles? Like there are:

    6 Operators who are responsible for the day-to-day pointing of the instrument, monitoring systems for health, etc.  Some redundancy here so that people can take vacations, not be on-call all the time, etc.
    3 Astrophysics post-docs who decide which proposals are worth spending telescope time on. (Need an odd number to break ties)
    1 Orbit mechanics specialist (to make sure it stays aloft, etc)
    3 Systems engineers who have a good "big-picture" idea of how the satellite works
    2 X-ray instrument subject matter experts
    2 programmers for firmware updates of the systems on the satellite
    2 programmers for programming systems on the ground
    2 I.T. support
    1 data analyst 
    2 electrical engineers for electrical issues debugging on the satellite, etc.
    1 RF/EE for the ground based and comms stuff
    2 mechanical engineers for mechanical issues debugging on the satellite, etc.
    2 thermal systems engineers, to make sure things are at the proper temperatures
    2 more astrophysics Ph.D's for helping answer technical questions about the instrument from the principle investigators for each proposal accepted for telescope time.
    5 managers
    2 receptionist/admins
    1 HR
    1 head honco
...plus 140 other full-time roles? Or what does the day to day operations look like for this type of instrument? Must be more than tell the telescope where to point, and then feeding the stream of bits to the various universities to interpret the data.

user

10 hours ago

[deleted]