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" F R I N G E S "
Space Interferometry Mission Newsletter
Number 38, October 24, 2006

CONTENTS

1. Key SIM requirement documents formally completed
2. SIM Science Team meets Nov 30-Dec 1
3. SIM PlanetQuest Engineering Milestones
4. SIM Technical Advisory Committee (SIMTAC) Meeting #40
5. Navigator Science Plan released

1. Key SIM requirement documents formally completed

In October, the SIM Project, NASA HQ, and the Science Team, formally completed two major documents that specify SIM's scientific operation. The Science Requirements Document (SRD) captures the instrument astrometric and operating performance; the Science Utilization Policies (SUP) specifies the allocation of observing time on SIM, limited proprietary data rights, and data distribution to the Science Team and the wider astronomical community. The Science Team, representing the astronomical community as well as their own SIM experiments, negotiated these over an extended period.

What's the significance of the SRD and SUP? First, they define the science and operations requirements which are prerequisites for the Project to successfully pass the Preliminary Design Review (PDR). Second, for the Project they form the foundation upon which its instrument and operations are designed and built, with a clear understanding of what constitutes success. For the Science Team, they specify the detail needed for planning the most effective astrometry experiments to perform.

2. SIM Science Team meets Nov 30-Dec 1

The SIM Science Team holds its 18th meeting on Nov 30-Dec 1, 2006. The Team was selected via a NASA AO in 2000, to plan SIM observations; to conduct preparatory science observations and modeling; and to provide science advice to the project. These are technical meetings for the Project to discuss technical and programmatic issues with the Team, and for the Team members to raise scientific, scheduling, and performance issues that affect their science. If you have science-related questions you would like the Team to discuss, please contact Steve Unwin well before the meeting.

3. SIM PlanetQuest Engineering Milestones

About a year ago the SIM PlanetQuest Project and NASA Headquarters established a set of nine Engineering Milestones (EMs) to track the progress of key events in the maturation of SIM's flight system development. These nine EMs were selected to track, with high visibility, key accomplishments in 'retiring' project flight system development risk, in the same way that the eight Technology Gates were used (those gates, completed in 2005, were featured in several previous Newsletters).

Five Engineering Milestones are to be completed during the Preliminary Design Phase (Phase B) of the project and the remaining four are to be completed during SIM's Detailed Design Phase (Phase C). Planned completion dates for these EMs are based upon a funding profile that supports a launch date of December 2011.

The first two of these EMs have already been completed on schedule (April and May 2006), achieving better performance than that needed to achieve goal-level SIM performance. These EMs demonstrated that key picometer metrology components (beam launchers and laser source) could be assembled, using flight-like processes, and meet performance requirements. Furthermore, they successfully met these requirements after being subjected to the extremes of dynamical and thermal environmental testing at the qualification levels to which the actual flight hardware will be subjected during launch and operations.

The third milestone (internal metrology launcher) is close, but needs additional thermal testing. It meets goal-level performance in all other respects. ['Goal-level' denotes performance substantially better than the minimum NASA has defined for mission success]. These thermal tests are well underway, and we expect completion and formal acceptance in November.

Congratulations to the Metrology development teams for their fantastic achievement in meeting all of these challenges!

4. SIM Technical Advisory Committee (SIMTAC) Meeting #40

The SIMTAC is now up to Meeting number 40, held in September, with the full SIMTAC board and some members of the Navigator Program External Independent Readiness Board present. While a number of other topics were discussed, the focus was on the technical details reflecting the completion of the first three engineering milestones. Very detailed discussions were held that concluded that two of the three engineering milestones (the external metrology launcher and the metrology laser source) had fully satisfied the requirements for completion and had demonstrated performance exceeding that required to achieve SIM's goal-level of performance. The Committee also discussed the third milestone (see above), recommending thermal testing over a larger range than had been performed so far.

5. Navigator Science Plan released

The Navigator Program Science Plan "Earth-Like Exoplanets: The Science of NASA's Navigator Program" is now available in PDF format at

http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/documents/NavigatorScience2006.pdf

This document outlines the exoplanet science content of NASA's Navigator Program, and it identifies the exoplanet research priorities. It was edited by Peter Lawson and Wes Traub. The goal of Navigator Program missions is to detect and characterize Earth-like planets in the habitable zone of nearby stars and to search for signs of life on those planets.

The Navigator Program includes: the ground-based Keck Interferometer and the Large Binocular Telescope Interferometer, designed to measure the inner and outer dust disks of nearby stars; three space-based missions: Space Interferometry Mission (SIM) PlanetQuest, Terrestrial Planet Finder Coronagraph (TPF-C), and Terrestrial Planet Finder Interferometer (TPF-I); and the Michelson Science Center (MSC). Each instrument and mission measures unique properties of exoplanets. Together the missions build a synergistic picture of exoplanets - no single mission can do this.

This document is based on "Precursor Science for TPF" (2004) but is much revised, and includes SIM and all of the Navigator missions. Revisions for the new document were the focus of the Navigator Science Forum held in Washington DC in May this year. A long list of contributors is given in Appendix E.

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Steve Unwin, Editor stephen.unwin'at'jpl.nasa.gov

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