Quote:
Originally Posted by samkent
Salaries? How much do these people make anyway? I am assuming there are only a few people in each team.
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Ms. Emily has a
blog entry about the day the entire tactical operations team was made up of women. She lists 31 names.
I think you grossly underestimate the amount of work required. In any given day, you need to:
- Decide which science investigations are most worthwhile
- Decide which science investigations are most practical
- Decide which science investigations you're actually going to do (given the above)
- Figure out how you're going to do them
- Figure out exactly what instructions need to be sent to the spacecraft
- Make absolutely sure you're sending the right instructions
- Figure out when the instructions can be sent to the spacecraft
- Schedule time to send the instructions
- Send the instructions to the spacecraft
- Make sure the instructions were received by the spacecraft correctly
- Figure out how the spacecraft should store the data collected
- Figure out when the data is going to be signalled back to Earth
- Schedule time to receive the data
- Receive the data
- Make sure the data was received correctly
- Process the data to put it into a human-analyzable form
- Distribute the data to all interested parties
And that's just to support science operations. At the same time, you've got people whose job it is to make sure that the spacecraft isn't too hot or too cold, that it's getting enough power, that it's not in a position that's hurting its ability to get power, that all the myriad subsystems are working properly, that the spacecraft memory and computer systems aren't being overloaded, and so on and so forth.
On top of that, you've got all the overhead: all of these people have secretaries and managers, they have offices and bathrooms, they have computers and electronic equipment that need to be maintained and upgraded, there are infrastructure systems like the Deep Space Network whose money these days comes almost entirely from the specific missions that use them.
They might possibly be able to run the rovers on less money, but the last time they tried to cut back in a big way, they lost a $150 million spacecraft because no one noticed either that data given in pounds was being interpreted as newtons or that - as a result - the spacecraft's trajectory was 100 kilometers closer to Mars than it should have been.