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in recognition of african american

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history month nasa salutes the

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contributions of african americans to

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the cause of space exploration my name

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is james fraction i'm an electrical

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engineer at nasa goddard space flight

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center

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one thing

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about this environment is that you

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don't go

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solo with many things around here if not

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anything at all

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i'm consistently working with

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my the design team that i'm a part of or

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even from working with the lab personnel

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also there's always some type of

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communication between other individuals

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that's going on so and i'm a pretty

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social guy so i don't mind that

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mms is a mission where we are in the

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process of designing and building a four

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identically instrumented spacecraft uh

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for the purposes of using the earth's

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magnetosphere as

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a basically a huge lab what the plan is

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is to study a concept called magnetic

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reconnection it's a process where the

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energy within the

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magnetic field of the earth is tapped

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and basically heat and kinetic energy is

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produced and scientists are very curious

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as to exactly how this process works so

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the reason we have four spacecraft is so

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that we can fly them in a tetrahedral

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formation and with the instruments on

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board each uh spacecraft we're able to

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actually

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do a 3d imaging of the magnetic

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reconnection events as they happen

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i am a member of the

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cndh which stands for command and data

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handling uh the subsystem of the member

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of their design team and my particular

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role on mms was to

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design a backplane which essentially is

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a bridge that connects the multiple cars

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that are within the cndh subsystem

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together it was pretty challenging and

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it was definitely a great work

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assignment environmental testing is uh

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done to ensure that the flight hardware

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would be able to withstand the rigors of

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the space environment

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so with projects i've worked on it's

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typically composed of three different

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tests there's the electromagnetic

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interference test another test is the

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vibration test and once that passes we

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go to a third round of testing which is

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thermal vacuum testing and essentially

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what that is is an assimilation of the

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space environment where we put the

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command and data handling system into a

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vacuum environment and we

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proceed to test the

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system over a variety of different

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temperatures

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a message i have for kids out there is

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to make sure that their math and science

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skills are strong and uh the last thing

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is just to be true to yourself i mean if

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you know

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that science or

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math or you know some type of it could

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be you know any other type of major out

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there or type of subject out there it's

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something that you have a strong passion

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for even if you may be a little hesitant