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PCB-Oct2016

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16 The PCB Magazine • October 2016 QUESTION 8: Regarding millennials: How do you lead a generation that says it doesn't want to be managed? Talk about an open-ended question! And the answers were pretty broad also, but a few themes emerged. People wrote things like "show the need for," "challenge them," "in- spire a shared vision," "teach team dynamics," "present clear goals," "communication," "don't micromanage, give them all participation tro- phies." The last one was noted by the respon- dent as sarcasm. Wait a minute; aren't these the things we all want in a job? To wit, millennials is just a catch-phrase; they want the same things the rest of us do but they are perhaps less willing to wait for it—less patient. They also have many more options outside of manufacturing—in fact, manufacturing is for the most part barely recognized as an option. And that is the real problem in our industry. One respondent com - mented, "Not all young people are archetypal millennials." Aha! And another person pretty much summed it all up this way, "The key is to manage someone without them knowing they are being man- aged. And that is not a trick, that is the essence of good leadership." How perfectly said on both counts. PCB LEADERSHIP AND...YOU Each time a rocket blasts off to de- liver a primary payload into space, it typically does so with room to spare— a reality that got NASA engineer Joe Burt thinking. Why not exploit that unused ca- pacity and create a sealed, pressur- ized, thermally controlled capsule that could take advantage of rideshare opportunities while accommodat- ing less-expensive, off-the-shelf instrument com- ponents typically used in laboratory-like settings? Several years in the making, Burt and his team at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, now are ready to validate portions of such a system. Called the Capsulation Satellite, or CapSat for short, the system is a hockey puck-shaped struc- ture that measures roughly 40 inches wide and 18 inches tall. Purposely designed as either a stand- alone system or stacked depending on payload needs, each capsule is capable of carrying about 661 pounds of payload into orbit—a microsatel- lite-class weight not accommodated by the increasingly popular CubeSat platform whose instruments typically weigh two to six pounds. With funding from NASA's Earth Science Technology Office, or ESTO, Burt and his team will validate Cap- Sat's all-important thermal-control system in a thermal-vacuum chamber test in late September. The system uses thermostatically controlled fans—much like those used to cool electronic equipment on Earth—to circulate air over hot and cold plates located inside the craft. This maintains a constant temperature where instruments would experience little, if any, thermal degradation while on orbit, Burt said. Under the ESTO-funded effort, Burt and God- dard detector expert Murzy Jhabvala also are con- ducting a study to scope out the specifics of fly- ing a next-generation photodetector camera on a CapSat. The idea is that NASA could fly the detec- tor on a constellation of CapSats to gather mul- tiple, simultaneous measurements. NASA Develops Satellite Concept to Exploit Rideshare Opportunities

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