Nearly 50 individuals from all across the U.S. and a few from Europe came together for one week at Caltech and JPL for the 12th annual NASA Planetary Science Summer School to learn what proposing a Discovery mission is all about. Discovery is NASA's program of low-cost, high quality, science investigations.

Titled "Discovery Micromissions: Focused Low Cost Science," the program offered PhD candidates and recent PhD graduates the opportunity to hear presentations from principal investigators and experts in many areas of mission design, then prepare their own mission proposal utilizing JPL's Project Design Center (PDC). It's been called a "crash course" in what it takes to develop a mission concept into a proposable mission design and a "boot camp for future principal investigators" on how to respond to a NASA Announcement of Opportunity for a competitively selected mission.

The students were organized into 3 groups: planets, satellites, and small bodies. They heard overviews on the Discovery program and the Stardust and Genesis missions, the NASA proposal process, instrumentation, systems engineering, and education and public outreach. All groups then spent time in the PDC where each participant assumed one project position: Principal investigator, Project Manager, System Engineer, Structural Engineer, Mission Designer, Mission Director, Instrumentation Engineer, Command and Data System Engineer, Propulsion Engineer, Financial/Cost Controller, Telecommunication Engineer, Power Engineer, Thermal Engineer, or Attitude Control Engineer. The PDC has a workstation for each of these positions in one room. A JPL analyst from "Team-X" sits at each of these consoles and makes subsytem and system level design trades. All parameters are fed into the linked consoles to determine what Discovery constraints, if any, have been violated. The prime constraint is cost. An iterative process occurs in real time to meet those constraints by trading off such variables as mass, data rate, number of instruments, launch vehicle, etc. After four days of information overload, the student groups worked well into the night to prepare their proposal.

On the final day, each group presented their proposal to representatives from the Discovery Program office and received feedback on the quality of their efforts. It was an intense week, but well worth the effort, according to the students, for this unique opportunity to interact with and learn from very accomplished scientists and engineers.

The summer school was sponsored by the NASA Office of Space Science and organized by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Footnote: One of the Planetary Science Summer School attendees, Nicolle Zellner, put together a web page highlighting her experience. It includes an overview of the program, the presentation her group produced with input received by the review team, and pictures of Project Design Center and tour sites around JPL. Click here for Nicolle's perspective.

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