Decisions, decisions

Suppose you had worked for four years to build an instrument and only got six minutes to fly it.  (That's how long our observation time will be during the rocket flight.)  Now imagine all the things that could go wrong during those six minutes!  How would you react and fix it?  You have built a new instrument that has never been in space before, so you're not completely sure how it will behave.  You're looking at targets that nobody has ever been able to see before, so you don't know for sure what you will find.  And you have only minutes to interpret what you are seeing and make any necessary adjustments.

Your palms should be sweating by now, and ours are too.  That's why we spent most of the day today establishing a plan for exactly what we will do during our rocket flight.  We dreamed up every scenario we could think of and made a written plan for decision-making during the flight.  We have two different targets we will point at on the Sun, and seven identical X-ray detectors.  An example scenario: what do we do if some of the detectors show high noise levels?  If a detector is noisy we have ways to fix this.  But what if we mistake actual X-rays for noise and "fix" it in a way that cuts out the data completely?  To avoid this awful outcome we decided that we will only make adjustments to one or two detectors, and leave any others as noisy as they want to be.  That way we hedge our bets and have the best shot at getting good data from at least some detectors.

Another example: our first target is going to be an active region on the Sun.  Active regions (sunspots) are the bright areas where most solar flares come from.  This region should emit large amounts of X-rays, so it will serve as an important check that the instrument works.  But what happens if we don't see anything from the active region?  Do we then go on and point to the quiet region of the Sun as we had planned?  Do we move to another active region?  Do we stay longer on the same one?  Do we try to make adjustments to the pointing?  All these choices were carefully talked over and hotly contested today, and we emerged at the end of the day with a clear plan for our flight.

This blog post has been way too serious so far, so I will finish off with a picture of our project manager trying on the rocket skin: 

Tomorrow we load the rocket onto the launch rail!