Zipprich was nominated for his overall excellence, but part of the contest requires a specific 911 call to be included with the application. “It ranges from basic medical calls somebody experiencing vomiting, and they need an ambulance for that, to somebody’s car just got stolen or their house just got burglarized or their house is on fire,” he said. The range of calls dispatchers field runs the gamut. … I’ve heard it said that if you enjoy what you do, you don’t work a day in your life. “For me, this is meaningful work and it’s something that I enjoy doing and that’s a big deal. “It is a dream come true to help humankind learn more about worlds beyond Earth that might host habitable environments.“I was looking for a way to feel like I had purpose in what I was doing and something that was more exciting than selling electrical parts,” said Zipprich, who got into the field 10 years ago. “Europa Clipper’s science and engineering objectives are the main reason I joined the project, and I have never stopped being excited about it,” Salami said. "We rely on thousands of people from all walks of life to bring it to fruition.”įor her part, Salami is grateful for being able to contribute directly to the mission’s future discoveries. "Considering the years of work that have gone into Europa Clipper’s star tracker, it drove home how far-reaching these missions really are," Massone noted. Developed by the Sodern company in France, Europa Clipper’s star tracker took over five years to study, design, build, and test. The star tracker is another example of the type of collaboration that goes into making a spacecraft like Europa Clipper. One of Europa Clipper’s star tracker optical heads in a JPL clean room for testing. In the cleanroom with Salami that day were Herrick Chang, cognizant engineer for the star tracker, guidance and control engineer Gabrielle Massone (the device’s contract technical manager), flight technician Jon Buckell, and Europa quality assurance engineer Shaunessy Grant. In another test, the engineers bypassed the optics and sent simulated star fields directly to the onboard computer to ensure it could identify any star field it was given. To test the star tracker, engineers showed the device two arrangements of simulated stars to make sure the optics worked and that the tracker communicated with the onboard computer. Identifying three or more stars, along with the stars’ orientation in the star tracker’s field of view, provides the spacecraft with its three axes of orientation in space. The star tracker views stars with a small camera, then matches them with the stars in its onboard catalog. “It gave me goose bumps to be a few feet away from the star tracker and think about its role in ensuring the success of this daring mission.” “The moment I saw it, I realized even more that our spacecraft is becoming a reality,” Salami said. The star tracker is the first piece of Europa Clipper flight hardware that Salami has seen in person after joining the mission more than eight years ago. She and other engineers were in a JPL cleanroom on October 26, 2021, to test the star tracker, which had recently arrived from France. Salami works in guidance and control for Europa Clipper. The device is essential for precisely pointing the spacecraft’s science instruments and communication antennas. After the spacecraft’s launch in October 2024, the star tracker will autonomously identify stars to determine Europa Clipper’s orientation in space. One of Europa Clipper’s star tracker electronics boxes (the bronze-colored cube at center) sits in a JPL clean room for testing.
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