Mission manager hand-over

After nearly two years as Rosetta mission manager, Fred Jansen has handed the ropes over to colleague Patrick Martin. Here Fred recounts the highlights of his term, and introduces the new mission manager. Fred, we know from the last year that Rosetta is a complex mission and one that has achieved many firsts, but what were the greatest challenges for you in taking over the role of mission manager prior to Rosetta waking up from deep space hibernation? When taking over Rosetta one of the more urgent issues was the readiness of the science planning systems and the overall flow of information from the principal investigators to science planning to mission planning to spacecraft and back. This, along with a number of pending mission-wide decisions, posed some real challenges. What was the toughest decision that you had to make as mission manager? Well, decisions come in two types. The ones you really need to make and the ones you’d like to avoid having to make. In the first category, what sticks in my brain most is the decision, just three weeks into the job, to go for a double pyramidal mapping trajectory in front of the comet, knowing full well this would impact some in-situ science related to the so-called dust acceleration region. In the second category, it was the continuous push in the night before the landing to reach a “Go” decision. We had some very tense discussions in order for everyone to realise that opting for a “No-Go” would only make sense if you could analyse and recover from the known problems within just 2–3 weeks – the time required to orbit the comet and get back to the correct point in space to deploy the lander. What was the most memorable moment for you? Absolutely the immense […]

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