Using the BOPPS Balloon Mission as a Tool to Provide Engineers with End-to-End Mission Development Experience

摘要

This paper discusses the benefits that high-altitude balloon missions offer to engineers in the space industry as a way to gain end-to-end mission development experience. Other types of missions such as sounding rockets, cubesats, and ride-along payloads offer similar benefits, but they are out of the scope of this paper. We provide an overview of NASA's balloon program followed by a description of the Balloon Observation Platform for Planetary Science (BOPPS) mission and a brief history of the previous high-altitude balloon missions that JHU/APL has launched. Then we discuss the benefits that balloon missions provide to workforce development in the space industry, especially in the areas of understanding the impacts of early design decisions, document tailoring, improved requirements engineering, appropriate tool selection, and providing engineers with proximity to flight systems.