>>KATRINA: All of the people involved with NASA’s Cassini
spacecraft are preparing for Cassini’s final plunge into the
planet Saturn on September 15th. One small portion of the people
who have spent years working on Cassini includes the team behind
the CIRS instrument, the Composite Infrared Spectrometer.
CIRS was built right here at the Goddard Space Flight Center, and
has been massively successful in operating without a single
command error in 13 years, and delivering groundbreaking
thermal and compositional data of Saturn and its moons.
Personally I think that the people behind the scenes in the
trenches operating the instrument are just as
interesting as the scientific discoveries they’ve enabled. The
CIRS team includes software engineers, project scientists,
people who calibrate the data, people who write commands for
the instrument, and more. Some have been on the team for just a
couple years, while some have been working with CIRS for over
two decades. How do you describe the CIRS team and your group of
people? --Ahem. [laughter] --In what terms? --Can we cut?
--Glowing! Glowing terms! >>MARCIA: We’re more like a
family than a group of colleagues at this point. We’ve
had, no one has left the team in a decade, so. >>EVER: Oh yes
every time I go into a meeting no matter my mood, I always,
these people always make me laugh, because they’re always,
it’s always funny, yes. >>KIMBERLY: I’ve found that too,
because before you walk in the door, you hear all this laughter
coming from the room, like before the meeting starts,
during the meeting, and as we’re on our way out the door, so.
>>MONTE: Yeah it’s critical to be able to get along because it
takes so much to get these commands up to the instrument.
There’s a lot of planning that goes on in the background,
months in advance before they’re ever set up. >>MARCIA: We have,
there are members who are very close outside of the office.
We’ve had a sort of a relationship start as friendship
bloom into something. >>VALERIA: Well for example we met when I
came here, and we were just friends for many many years.
Right? >>SHANE: That’s the story we’re told and we’re going with
it. >>VALERIA: But then one day she posted it on Facebook a
picture of us getting married. >> SHANE: We’re all very happy
for you. >>NICO: Thank you. And now we have a boy. >>VALERIA:
Three years old. >>NICO: A Cassini baby. >>VALERIA: A
Cassini baby, yes. >>NICO: Super smart. [babbling in French,
pretending to call JPL] >>SHANE: We have a lot of Cassini babies
though. All your kids, my kids. Terry’s got a bunch yeah,
Carrie’s got a bunch, Carly’s got a bunch. You don’t have any.
>>NICK: I was born before Cassini though, I’m not that
young. >>SHANE: That’s true, at least there’s that. [laughter]
>>KATRINA: What was one really dramatic or exciting or
memorable time from your time operating the CIRS instrument?
>>DON: The most exciting times are the ones at 2 in the
morning. I fortunately haven’t had to be up at 2 in the morning
myself, but some of these people have, where some emergency
occurs on the spacecraft and it has to be solved immediately.
>>EVER: My son Wesley was born November 2010. And just two
hours after he was born, there was an anomaly on the
spacecraft. And it basically took about 15 days to recover
from that anomaly. So everybody every time people ask me “what
happened on that day?” I know exactly what happened because
that’s when my son was born. I call it the Wesley Anomaly.
[laughter] >>DON: But there’s a much larger picture. We’re
operating the instrument, and we’ve been doing that for 20
years, but before that the instrument had to be built, and
it was built by an army of people here at Goddard and they
were all very dedicated just like we are, and those people
all had a very good time building the instrument. >>PAUL:
We have a little mirror that scans back and forth inside the
instrument. This little mirror moving one centimeter since
2004, we’ve calculated that by the end of mission it will have
run four marathons. And it has not failed. And the engineers at
Goddard, they said it has an infinite lifetime. I kind of
laughed, because you know what moving part has an infinite
lifetime? Well, I guess we’ll never prove it because after
twenty years it’s still working fine. But that just really
amazes me the quality of Goddard engineering. >>KATRINA: What are
you most proud of, with the CIRS instrument and how the team has
operated over the years? >>NICO: It’s the best team. No it’s
true. We have the most publications, the most data
acquired, we have the highest quality of archived data, we
have a flawless operation. >>SHANE: Cutest children.
>>NICO: Cutest children. [laughter] >>KATRINA: What will
that final moment be like when Cassini stops sending back data?
>>DON: We’ll be waiting for that final signal, but Cassini will
have already burned up an hour and a half earlier because it
takes that long for light to get here from Saturn. It takes that
long for the signal that was re-, the final signal to get
back here to Earth. So Saturn will already have swallowed up
Cassini a long time before we actually see that last signal. I
think we’ll know that when we’re sitting there. >>CARRIE: We
will, it’s sad. >>JOHN: I think it’s a little hard to anticipate
people’s reactions. I mean it’s like a death in the family at a
certain level. You know it’s coming and so on, but just how
you react to the gut level, some people will be surprised.
>>KATRINA: For you what will that moment be like when Cassini
ends? >>MARCIA: Um, sad. >>TERRY: I worked on the Galileo
mission just tangentially as a grad student, and this mission
discovered just as much as Galileo did around Jupiter. And
at the end, you’re left with more questions than you are
answers. >>DON: There’s life after Cassini. >>KIMBERLY: I’m
thinking even after this mission ends though, this group will be
providing data to the research community for many years to
come. So I’m sure folks will go back and analyze and re-analyze
the data over and over again and new discoveries will probably
continue to be found for a long time. >>KATRINA: Are there any
other thoughts about Cassini and the CIRS instrument that you
want to share on camera before we wrap up here? >>CARRIE: This
is the group you can depend on. We all can depend on each other,
no matter what. No matter how much time passed, three months
go by and you could walk into someone’s office and they’re
there for you. And that’s, that’s what I’ll remember, you know.
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