Here Am I, Floating Round My Tin Can
Major Tom sure did feel lonely in his orbital social distancing, didn’t he?
Hello and welcome to installment 4 of our blog! This is Nathan. I’ll be your guide for this post.
When we last checked in 4 weeks ago, we had no idea of all that would be happening in the next few weeks. Wow, have things changed! Through the good and bad our team is feeling optimistic and finding our way forward.
Sprint 3: Earth
But first, let’s talk about how things rounded out for Sprint 3. First and foremost, we finished synthesizing and analyzing our Johnson Space Center research through affinity diagramming. This was an intense process, and the results will help us navigate the wealth of information we encountered on our trip to the Johnson Space Center.
And in addition to finishing our affinity diagram, we also digitized our post-it notes to our virtual whiteboard in Miro.
Despite the difficulty of working over video calls and online collaborative tools, we are going to come through this having learned so much about these tools, and how best to work with colleagues and clients around the globe. It can even be pretty fun at times.
Sprint 4: Mars
Now, back to more recent events. We started our spring break on March 6th, happy to get away from class schedules and enjoy a little downtime, but little did we know that we wouldn’t be coming back to campus! Over our break, the COVID-19 virus began hitting the US in full effect, and Carnegie Mellon like many other universities in the US decided to transition to remote teaching, most likely until the end of the spring semester. So what does this mean for our project? The short answer is, we are moving forward, full speed ahead albeit with a few changes.
The first thing to tackle for sprint 4 was to make sure we had the tools and organization in place to continue our collaborative work while respecting the recommended social-distancing guidelines. Our previous toolkit included Slack, Trello, Miro, Google Drives, and Airtable. The major new addition to this set is Zoom, a great app for high-quality video conferencing.
The second task of this sprint is to gain a greater understanding of how might our new circumstances change the way we think about our problem space and which problems we want to solve. We are still working through this question, and the answers we discover will probably trickle in over the next few weeks as we continue our research and design work.
On the research front, we had a few recent milestones: we actually had the opportunity to speak with astronauts! Through some networking and LinkedIn messaging, we managed to contact 2 former astronauts who were kind enough to offer their time to us for interviews. We have begun synthesis of these interviews and plan to add our findings to our digital affinity diagram.
And last of all for Sprint 4, we are also excited to announce we have a team name!
Team Talos
Talos was a giant bronze automaton created to protect the island of Crete. According to Wikipedia(1 2):
The word “automaton” is the latinization of the Greek αὐτόματον, automaton, (neuter) “acting of one’s own will”.
We felt this had clear ties to our problem space: enabling courageous deep space explorers to act on their own will. It also sounds pretty good too! Alliteration always has an excellent effect.
This Week’s Media Recommendation
Did you know that NASA streams EVA missions live on YouTube? Our team took the opportunity to do a “customer observation” of a 9-hour Extra-Vehicular Activity that was carried out this past November 22nd. Check it out here: Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer Repair Spacewalk #2, Nov. 22, 2019
