P2K: What do you do?

Jennifer Harris Trosper: I am the Project System Engineer, which means I work for the Project Manager, and am responsible for a big set of stuff, but basically the overall requirements from what NASA Headquarters has said: "Your mission needs to do..." Making sure that we understand and flow all the information down, and we have all the right requirements and understanding of what the design needs to do. I'm also responsible for the overall risk management; not only what are we worried about today, but what we should worry about in five months, and is there anything we ought to be doing today that we're not.

So, I'm the "big picture" person. I'm the one who has to make sure that the Flight System, which is the vehicle that we are actually designing, its capabilities are consistent with the Mission System, which is the design of the trajectories and how we do operations, and then the Science Objectives and the Science Office (Joy Crisp), and the Principal Investigator (Steve Squyres) and everything they want to do - have to make sure those all fit together and meet our mission success requirements.