[HN Gopher] Senators and Congressmen urge NASA not to defund the...
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       Senators and Congressmen urge NASA not to defund the Chandra X-ray
       Observatory [pdf]
        
       Author : consumer451
       Score  : 6 points
       Date   : 2024-06-12 22:05 UTC (56 minutes ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (moulton.house.gov)
 (TXT) w3m dump (moulton.house.gov)
        
       | consumer451 wrote:
       | To give credit, I found this via a post from Phil Plait:
       | 
       | https://bsky.app/profile/philplait.bsky.social/post/3kuqw2qr...
        
       | floxy wrote:
       | I found that there are about 180 people (according to the FAQ:
       | https://www.savechandra.org/faq) working on the project. Anyone
       | know the breakdown of those roles? Like there are:
       | 5 Operators who are responsible for the day-to-day pointing of
       | the instrument, monitoring systems for health, etc.  Some
       | redundancy here so that people can take vacations, not be on-call
       | all the time, etc.         3 Astrophysics post-docs who decide
       | which proposals are worth spending telescope time on. (Need an
       | odd number to break ties)         1 Orbit mechanics specialist
       | (to make sure it stays aloft, etc)         2 Systems engineers
       | who have a good "big-picture" idea of how the satellite works
       | 2 X-ray instrument subject matter experts         2 programmers
       | for firmware updates of the systems on the satellite         2
       | programmers for programming systems on the ground         2 I.T.
       | support         1 data analyst          1 electrical engineer for
       | electrical issues debugging on the satellite, etc.         1
       | RF/EE for the ground based and comms stuff         1 mechanical
       | engineer for mechanical issues debugging on the satellite, etc.
       | 2 more astrophysics Ph.D's for helping answer technical questions
       | about the instrument from the principle investigator for each
       | proposal accepted for telescope time.         4 managers
       | 
       | Or what does the day to day operations look like for this type of
       | instrument? Must be more than tell the telescope where to point,
       | and then feeding the stream of bits to the various universities
       | to interpret the data.
        
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       (page generated 2024-06-12 23:02 UTC)