This episode features an interview with Dr. Laura Jones-Wilson on the development of a science traceability and alignment framework (STAF) for NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, which will launch in late 2024.

It covers how the science objectives of the Europa Clipper were organized through the STAF and used to derive the top level requirements for its nine different science instruments. This helped establish a core set of definitions and links between ideas and served as a significant way to frame conversations between engineers and scientists.

This conversation discusses how aspects of the spacecraft design were influenced by the instrument suite, and how requirements and constraints were realized. We discuss how what motivated creating a science traceability and alignment framework, how it was developed over time through inputs from engineers and scientists alike, and how it helped become a useful tool for interfacing with many different organizations

Dr. Laura Jones-Wilson is a Systems Engineer at JPL whose career has spanned work in both dynamics and control systems as well as systems engineering, where she has been since 2012. While working on the Europa Clipper mission, she served as both the Instrument Systems Engineer for the Ultraviolet Spectrograph (UVS) instrument as well as the lead for the payload verification & validation activities. In addition to the Europa Clipper mission, Laura has held roles as the project systems engineer for STABLE (a balloon-borne sub-arcsecond pointing demonstration), the Project Investigator for a Mars Sample Capture technology development effort, and is now supporting the Sample Recovery Helicopter project. She is also co-manager of the SmallSat Dynamics Testbed at JPL which is used for testing SmallSat attitude control hardware.

Papers & Resources:

• Project Science Traceability and Alignment Framework (PSTAF) paper: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7943667
• Measurement Science Traceability & Alignment Framework (MSTAF) paper: https://dataverse.jpl.nasa.gov/file.xhtml?fileId=58980&version=1.1
• Project website: https://europa.nasa.gov/

Timestamps

0:00 - Episode overview

5:50 - Laura's background

15:05 - Europa Clipper background

20:18 - REASON (radar instrument) integration challenges

25:00 - Managing operational constraints for different instruments (processes & tools)

28:00 - Operations design & management tools & integration with STAF matrices

32:30 - Brief overview of PSTAF/MSTAF

36:20 - Integrating PSTAF/MSTAF with operational tools

49:30 - how PSTAF helps understand and manage risk related to instrument performance

55:12 - using PSTAF to communicate with science teams

58:50 - motivation for developing PSTAF

1:03:00 - Balancing needs from multiple instrument teams

1:12:48 - Mapping science needs to engineering constraints

1:19:58 - Development process for PSTAF/MSTAF (collecting feedback & philosophy)

1:31:00 - Ties to MBSE

1:35:48 - Differences between Europa Clipper and Cassini/other large NASA-led missions

1:41:44 - How Laura got involved in the Europa Clipper project

1:46:45 - Random question!

1:50:44 - Building on PSTAF

1:52:30 - Wrap-up

1:55:10 Episode outro