Tracy Drain

Maybe half an inch, maybe less.

Google is your friend.

Go look.

I'm sure it's out there.

In order to take the environment for the radiation inside the vault down to a level that's more manageable.

It becomes more like the environment at Mars, which we're very used to designing for.

Oh, we definitely have to have experts.

In order to make a mission like this, it really takes a village.

You have a lot of people who are specialists in a variety of areas.

We have people who are specialists about even just the electromagnetic environment and how we have...

instruments on board that are trying to measure the magnetic field.

And the spacecraft itself, because it has circuits with electricity, makes a small electromagnetic field.

So one of the things, if you're looking at an image of the spacecraft, it has this very long boom sticking out one side that has magnetometers on the end of it.

And that's to get it away from the magnetic field that the spacecraft is generating itself.

So, yeah, there are lots of specialists in a variety of areas.

Me as a systems engineer, my job is to make sure all of the different aspects of the spacecraft work together, drawing on the knowledge of the experts in those variety of areas and the experts in the different spacecraft components like telecom and thermal and propulsion and all of that good stuff.

Yeah, well, luckily for me, JPL is only 15 minutes drive away, so no helicopters for me.

Is that lucky?

I don't know.

That would be fun.