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LaACES Schedule

For the semester and the next few weeks

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What you will be doing

• Effort now shifts to designing, building and flying your payload.

• You will need to apply everything you learned last semester

70% of student built payloads suffer a partial or complete failure.

How well you fare will depend almost exclusively upon how well you manage your project!

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Spring 2006 Timeline

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The Design Phase

• Little to no hardware testing or prototyping• Define science goals and objectives• System level design (subject of Lecture 3)

– System requirements derived from goals and objectives– Identify major subsystems and interfaces

• Concept hardware and software design– Derived from system requirements and constraints– Identify parts, costs & availability

• Establish tasks, schedule, resource needs and plans for remaining phases of life-cycle

• Develop preliminary risk assessment & management plan• Phase terminates with Preliminary Design Review (PDR)

“Paper” study of all issues to establish major concepts and plans

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Preliminary Design Review (PDR)

• The PDR should cover results from your design phase including:– Goals & objectives

– Preliminary System design

– Concept hardware & software design

– Tasks, schedule, resource needs, long-lead items

– Preliminary risk assessment & management plan

• Should show that you have “thought the problem through”

• Include written document and oral presentation– Format of document was discussed in PM - Lecture 8

– Document template on the LaACES website

• LSU faculty will attend & participate in the PDR

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Specific PDR Plan

• Next four weeks you will work on your PDR document– Specific sections will be due each week– Each section will be reviewed and returned for your updates

• Sections through Mission Objectives due 1/24• Sections through Payload Design due 1/31• Sections through Payload Development, Construction

and Mission Operations due 2/7• Sections through Project Management, Master Schedule

and Master Budget due 2/14• Final document due 2/20, PDR on 2/21

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Effort for this week

• Establishing a clear understanding of your goals, objectives and requirements is necessary for a correct payload design– Determine what you must do– Determine what can be removed– Set constraints on how to do it

• ALL of your planning and payload design flows from this critical first step

• A considerable amount of time, resources and effort in a project can be wasted if a set of requirements is not initially, clearly defined

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Requirement flow

Science Background

Mission Goal

Requirements

Science Objectives Technical Objectives

Payload Design

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Mission Goal

• A mission goal is a simple, straight forward explanation of …– What you intend to do

– Why you are doing it

– Where you are doing it

• For example, the mission goal for the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) is very simple“… to search for and characterize a wide range of rocks and soils

that hold clues to past water activity on Mars.”

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Objectives

• Objectives include the specific items that need to be achieved by the mission / payload.

• Science Objectives include specific measurements derived from the “science background” that are needed to satisfy the mission goal– For example, what does “characterize … rocks and soil”

actually mean?

• Technical Objectives include specific physical characteristics needed to satisfy the mission goal– For example, what does “search for … a wide range of”

actually mean?

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Requirements

• Derived directly from the science background, mission goal, science objectives and technical objectives

• Constrains and specifies how the payload is constructed and operated– Requirements should point back to a specific objective

• For example, one MER requirement may have been how many rocks they would have to sample – This would, in turn, set a requirement on rover range– Required range would then set a requirement on durability of

the rover wheel system

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So, for tonight …

• Update, if necessary, the LaACES participants information list.

• Clean up and put away your hardware. You will not need any of this for several weeks.

• Determine who is working on what payload this semester– You may want to focus on only two payloads

• Download the PDR template• Establish your tasks for the coming week• Setup your team meeting times