As I said last time, these ORTs are an interesting look at how surface operations will run. I worked the midnight to 8AM shift again, but this time, I stayed later a few times and shadowed some of the leaders so I could learn about surface operations.

The ORTs are designed to find the bugs in the system, on an operational level. Obviously, the power supply issue, but there were a few other errors that cropped up; pointing was off on some pictures, other parameters on instruments were set incorrectly which results in undesired effects (<- very diplomatic of me).

That's why we have these tests. The point of this one was nominal ops, getting to a TEGA delivery. We had some issues with that, above the power one. As I shadowed the ops team, I got to see decisions made on a flight-like basis (how they would be handled in actual surface ops) and test basis. This last basically meant that when the RA was unable to acquire a sample and get ready to deliver, and instead of fixing it as they would in flight, they declared a test-ism, sprinkled some "magic dust" and declared the Arm ready to go. My team that was running the model had to fix the arm and make it ready, something that would be impossible on the real spacecraft.

E-mail this entry to a friend