Spacecraft are complex, one-of-a-kind robots operating in unforgiving and sometimes unknown environments. Things go wrong. Nearly every space mission involves one or more incidents, surprises, or anomalies. This talk will describe how we design spacecraft to keep on flying when things get "funky". How we debug what went wrong from a zillion miles away and hack our way around the problems. Steve will share several "war stories" of diabolical space problems and their creative in-flight "fixes".
Steve Collins is a guidance and control engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Steve was Cruise ACS System Engineer for the Mars Curiosity Rover, and has worked on numerous NASA/JPL missions including Dawn, Deep Impact, MER, DS1, and Galileo. In flight, Steve's job consists of keeping the spacecraft pointed in the right direction, making trajectory corrections and figuring out "what the heck just happened??