NASA’s Stardust spacecraft brought back much more than a sample of ancient comet dust when it parachuted into the salt flats of Utah’s U.S. Air Force Test and Training Range on Jan. 15, 2006.  For a group of enterprising USC Viterbi School undergrads interested in engineering management, the nearly seven-year-long mission left a legacy of lessons that they will help catalogue for use in future NASA missions.

Stardust capsule parachutes to a soft landing on the desert floor in Utah’s U.S. Air Force Test and Training Range on Jan. 15, 2006.   NASA/JPL-Caltech image.

    
The team of engineering students are partnering this year with the Stardust mission’s former project manager Ken Atkins at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to undertake a NASA project manager’s dream: to have an easy-to-use encyclopedia of tips and solutions to the thousands of problems they face during spacecraft development at their fingertips.

Such an encyclopedia already exists.  It’s a voluminous NASA reference guide called the NASA Public Lessons Learned System (PLLS).  With Atkins’ help, and guidance from three Viterbi School engineering faculty, the students are examining all of the lessons learned from Stardust and many other NASA missions to gain new knowledge and skills in engineering management.  

“We’ve been at this for about a year now,” says Alison Lind, a freshman majoring in industrial and systems engineering.  “I’m interested in operations efficiency, so this project is helping to give me hands-on experience in understanding how projects are actually carried out.”

JPL Liaison
Najmedin Meshkati, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, is the principal investigator for the project and USC’s liaison with JPL.  He has worked two summers at JPL as a NASA Faculty Fellow, bringing students and industry professionals together for projects.  He frequently invites project managers like Atkins and Dudley Killam, manager of JPL’s Office of Safety and Mission Success Operations, to campus to discuss various missions and some of the key management issues that emerged along the way.   

“This is the kind of interaction and feedback that sticks with students,” Meshkati says.  “When they have a chance to meet with project managers, they are able to hear about first-hand experiences and issues that cropped up behind the scenes, and how managers dealt with them.  I can’t think of a better way to teach them about the business.”  

Some of these students are part of the Viterbi School’s Merit Research Program, a unique program designed to support and encourage research-oriented undergraduate students.  Each year, the Admission and Student Affairs Office invites a select group of entering freshmen to work with faculty on current research projects.  The students can stay in the Merit Research Program for up to four consecutive years, provided they make satisfactory academic progress toward their engineering degrees.

For this particular project, the group meets frequently to brainstorm and work through project “incidents” — glitches that occurred during the development, testing or launch phases of NASA missions.  They evaluate each problem to determine the nature of the issues.

As the process unfolds, they begin to realize that the seeds of many problems in flight hardware development are laid down very early.

“We’re trying to separate the lessons that are documented into two basic categories, those that are technical and those that apply to the management of a flight project,” says Isaac Maya, director of research in the USC Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism (CREATE).  “That means we have to evaluate each lesson in the PLLS using a specific set of criteria, which gives the students insights into how projects are put together and how they are run.”

Najmedin Meshkati, center standing, discusses a technical issue with students, left to right, Alison Lind,  Reb Burky, and Kim Pacheco.

NASA’s Voluminous PLLS
NASA’s PLLS spans decades of spaceflight.  Broken down by year and mission, it chronicles major lessons learned in hardware development and testing in a project, from the first structural tests of a spacecraft’s frame to the final acoustics tests of its tiniest auxiliary sensors.  Each lesson is a “nugget of wisdom” to a project manager, Maya says, but often times, those project management nuggets are just too difficult to find among the technical nuggets.

“The project management issues can be broken down into five basic areas: cost control, time management, containment of the scope of the project, risk assessment and mitigation, and quality assurance,” Maya says.  “Project management monitors and addresses these issues via communication, reporting [of problems] and reviews. So we go through each lesson learned using these criteria, then extract the lessons that really apply to project managers.”      

The students are particularly good at zeroing in on different criteria based on their own academic interests.  For instance, Kim Pacheco, a sophomore civil engineering major, likes to evaluate the technical issues.  Last year, she worked with Meshkati on another JPL-NASA project to evaluate the requirements and specifications for a Mars sample return facility.
 
“We were analyzing the safety requirements and levels of cleanliness that would have to be enforced in clean rooms, cabinets and glove boxes in a sample return facility, which NASA will build specially for a future Mars sample return mission,” she says, “and I really enjoyed that.”

Reb Burky, a freshman in civil engineering, is particularly adept at spotting cost overruns.  

“I’m interested in the business aspects of project management, so that’s what I’m usually looking for,” he says.

The Hard Questions
Mansour Rahimi, an associate professor at the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, is the third faculty adviser.  He is often the one who asks the hard questions: How do we transform the knowledge gained by this research into a useful form of information and how should it best be displayed in the PLLS?  This requires not only knowledge about the program management process, but also knowledge about issues related to interface design for a complex information system.

Isaac Maya, right foreground, asks teaching assistant Jared Fortune, across from him, for feedback on a mission management issue.

“This is all relevant to my work at the Aerospace Corporation,” asserts teaching assistant Jared Fortune, who is completing his master’s degree this spring in industrial and systems engineering. Fortune is an aerospace analyst with a lot of experience managing small teams.  His job is to keep the PLLS project, and the students, on track.  
    
The PLLS cataloguing project is an ongoing effort funded by JPL’s competitive Director’s Research and Development Fund (DRDF).  Those working on the project during fall semester were all students of Meshkati.  They included freshmen engineering majors Alison Lind and Reb Burky; sophomore engineering majors Anuj Nijhawan and Kim Pacheco; and anthropology senior Meredith Schulte.  

Lind, Burky and Pacheco are supported by awards from the Merit Research Program. Viterbi School graduate student Jared Fortune, one of Meshkati’s TAs, served as team leader.  He and most of the students are continuing their work on the project this semester.