Carmen Rodriguez |
Madrid (EFE) A process that Ignacio Tanco, the person in charge of operations of Juice, has experienced before its takeoff to Jupiter.
Although the team knows that they are simulations, the “stress experienced is very high” because “they put us under considerable pressure” and in none of them “you get to feel really comfortable”, but they are “very valuable” to improve, says the engineer Basque to EFE.
Several months to overcome twenty simulations in which they have never lost the Juice probe (at the time of this interview there were still two to do). “We have never reached that point, although several times we have gotten into quite narrow alleys, but we have always managed to get out.”
Tanco, born in Urnieta (Guipúzcoa), joined the European Space Agency (ESA) in 2001 as an operations engineer, where he has worked on missions such as Rosetta, Solar Orbiter and BepiColombo.
Now, as the operations manager for the Juice mission, which will take off from the European port in French Guiana on the 13th, he is in charge of the group of engineers that commands and carries out the operations for the probe to reach Jupiter on a journey of almost eight years.
Juice (Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer) is going to visit one of the “most mysterious and important” places in the solar system, the gas giant Jupiter and three of its icy moons: Callisto, Europa and, above all, Ganymede, he explains.
The simulation campaign reproduces the possible problems to have the team trained “even in the face of the most extreme failures”, from the operation of the ship to external threats such as solar radiation and debris, going through human issues such as team cohesion.
The drills are carried out in a control room of the European Space Operations Center that ESA has in Darmstadt (Germany) and Juice is run by two teams, Red, led by Tanco, and Blue, between them they cover 24 hours a day. day.
During the simulation days “it is not that one failure happens, but many”. There are hundreds of scenarios, he says, from a solar panel not being deployed to the on-board computer not realizing that it has separated from the rocket or the propulsion systems not working.
At the end of one of these days “you end up as if you had spent the day in the gym pushing to the fullest, you suffer at the moment, but you come out saying: thank goodness I did it”.
Tanco acknowledges that the best simulations are the ones in which you see that you have made a mistake in something, because “it is where you learn the most”, sometimes you discover that “you do something with which you make a bad situation worse”.
That happened to the team recently. They were convinced of what the bug was and how to fix it, only to find out that they were completely wrong. “We had to completely modify the diagnosis and the way of responding. It was very valuable.”
As the team racks their brains against the clock, one floor below is a small windowless room, “the Simulation Bunker,” where you are in complete control of Juice’s virtual alter ego, watching and hearing everything that happens. in the main room.
The simulation officers (two in the case of this mission) “know where we are at all times so that failures arrive at the most inopportune moment.”
Sometimes they send someone out of the room, they may have gotten sick or they didn’t come to work that day due to an accident.
“Everyone is left with a checkered face”, but that is how it is discovered if there are holes in the training, because “if a person is missing there must be another who knows how to do more or less the same”.
Tanco laughs when asked if the sim team is the evil minds. Actually, they are “very close people”, with whom they see each other almost daily and participate in all the meetings.
“Their job is to train us and they have to know where the weak points are,” says the operations manager. “They look at us almost like a coach looks at an athlete and asks: what do I have to do to make it better?”
The simulation campaign depends on each mission and covers the critical phases. In this case, it reproduces the approximately 36 hours of early orbit operations, beginning when Juice separates from the rocket, 27 minutes and 45 seconds after launch.
The probe has, among other things, to wake up the on-board computer, deploy the solar panels to survive, and communicate with the ground to receive commands and send telemetry data.
The worst possible scenario is that the computer does not wake up after the separation, “under these conditions it is consuming the batteries and if you do nothing the satellite dies and the mission is lost.”
The team faced this “particularly complex scenario, because you have to do a lot of critical actions blindly, but we managed to solve it and we came out of it very happy”.