How did we handle the transition to remote work?
The omnipresence of the Covid-19 pandemic is known to just about everyone. Our team has done its best to successfully navigate this process however we have faced a few difficulties, as well as been given some opportunities. So we’d like to take a moment to talk about how this transition went for our team, as well as mention some currently happening, and future, plans of ours.
The UMN SmallSat team is large. We have about 60 people on our team, divided into eight sub-teams. Many people who work in large teams are experiencing a similar problem to the one we faced: it is difficult to communicate on this scale without any face-to-face contact. To paraphrase our (at the time) Project Manager Jenna Burgett, because we cannot use our physical space, a separate issue we’ll soon talk about, we cannot stop by to ask questions of others. Moving online has channeled all of our dialogue into email and slack. By now we’ve become more proficient in collaborating online, however we haven’t been able to emulate in-person effectiveness fully.
The second, and equally pertinent, challenge we faced is the loss of ability to use our lab. With the campus shut down students were no longer allowed within our lab, inhibiting our engineers access to their hardware, which clearly halts progress a bit. Specifically we had quite a bit of planned testing that needed to be pushed back. As of July some of our essential team members have thankfully regained access.
As both our Chief engineer, Kyle Houser, and Jenna would comment, there has been one benefit to moving online: a shift in focus. By having the ability to continue testing removed our team has been able to refocus, and reconsider some of our plans. As such, we have been able to focus on improving our quality of documentation as well as constructing plans for our future.
What's new this summer?
To speak of the future, this summer marks a large change for the SmallSat team, both our Team Leader and Chief Engineer will be continuing onward and we will transition to new leadership. Taking the place of undergrad Project Manager will be Meredith Wieber, and Marie Wulff will become our new undergrad Chief Engineer. Meredith is a rising senior in Astrophysics and Physics, while Marie is a rising senior in Electrical Engineering. Our new, and currently coexisting, leadership has outlined some plans for the remainder of our summer.
What are we working on right now?
We’re moving into testing between our subsystems as well as developing interfaces. We’re still working on writing our Interface Control Documents but following this the interface testing will be possible. In our time online several sub-teams have been able to position their circumstances so that they can build their hardware when returning to the SmallSat lab. Our current goal is to be able to wire these systems together and spread them out across a table, so we’ve given this goal the endearing name of FlatSat. Once this goal is achieved we can move forward testing software for these systems.
Corbin Condon
Quality Assurance Team Lead