Music Music Music MusicMy name is Aprille Ericsson and I am an instrument manager. My formal title is Deputy Instrument Manager for the ICESat Atlas instrument. It's a huge instrument, it has two lasers, they're for redundancy, meaning that if one fails you have a backup. But if provides a laser beam that passes down to the ground through various optics to the ground and bounces back up off the surface of the polar ice. And very closely you're able to look at the distance that goes from the spacecraft down to the ground and back up, and then you can tell as you pass back over how much it's changed in that short duration. As an instrument manager, I have many responsibilities and it's mainly to manage resources. Resources are many things. People don't often think of people as resources but it's helping the product delivery leads, which are the people who engineer primarily who build the hardware, helping them to be able to deliver their hardware on time. And then there's the budget, so you have a plan that you try to maintain and keep in line with and while you're doing that, you try to keep things on track and on schedule, so you're budgeting your financial budget as well as time budget or plan. But primarily it's a job of communication. The exciting part is one of science. The opportunity to understand something like global warming. If ice changes, that has an impact to vegetation, it has an impact to sea levels rising, which could either change either having droughts or flooding. Education is a passion for me, but I really it's important to keep up sort of the cadre of junior people coming up behind us to continue to fill the ranks for Americans and to help us remain prominent in delivery of science and technology. I always say shoot for the moon and even if you miss you'll still be amongst the stars, and of course some people will be really literal and say You might be very far away the stars, but realistically what I'm saying is shoot for high things and high goals and you may not always achieve what you want but you'll achieve something because you really shot for something very lofty.Music Music