My name is James Fraction, I'm an electrical engineer at NASA Goddard Space Flight
Center. One thing about this environment is
that you don't go solo with
anything around here, not anything at all. I'm consistently working with
the design team that I'm apart of or even from
working with the lab personnel. There's always some type of communication between other
individuals that's going on, and I'm a pretty social guy, so
I don't mind that.
Music
MMS is a mission
where we are in the process of designing and building four
identically instrumented spacecraft for the purposes
of using the Earth's magnetosphere as basically
a huge lab. The plan is to study a concept
called magnetic reconnection. It's a process where the energy within
the magnetic field of the Earth is tapped
and basically heat and kinetic energy is produced. And scientists are very curious
as to exactly how this process works. So the reason we have four
spacecraft is so that we can fly them in a tetrahedral formation
and with the instruments on board each spacecraft we're able to
actually do a 3-D imaging of
magnetic reconnection events as they happen. I am a
member of the C&DH, which stands for Command and Data Handling
the subsystem, I'm a member of their design team.
And my particular role on MMS was to design a
backplane, which essentially is a bridge that connects the
multiple cards that are within the C&DH subsystem together
It was pretty challenging and it was definitely
a great work assignment. Environmental testing is
done to ensure that the flight hardware
will be able to withstand the rigors of the space environment
So with the projects that I've worked on, it's typically composed of
three different tests. There's the electromagnetic interference test,
another test is the vibration test, and once that passes
we go through a third round of testing, which is thermal vacuum
testing. And essentially what that is a simulation of the
space environment where we put the Command and Data Handling system into
a vacuum environment and we
proceed to test the system over a variety
of different temperatures. The message I have for kids out
there is to make sure that their math and science skills are strong
and the last thing is to just be true to yourself. I mean, if you
know that science or math
or any other type of major out there
or type of subject out there, it's something you have a strong passion for
even if you may be a little hesitant, go for it. Dream big.
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