Monitoring Real-Time Ops

I work on a three-person team called the "Requirements Planning Team", or RP-Team. One of our jobs is to support Real Time Operations. We track on all of the ESA research objectives for a particular increment - and advocate for these objectives within mulitlateral science meetings with NASA, JAXA, and CSA. We also monitor how much crewtime we spend for ESA activities, and regularly sync up with NASA crewtime engineers. The real-time part of the job can be challenging. There are regular meetings and products and deadlines that need to be met. Also, there are regular difficulties that arise with anomalous situations - so you have to be prepared to accept phone calls and conduct assessments and give advice during nights and on weekends sometimes.

Because this part of the job can be so intense, the three of us on the RP-Team take turns. We work by increments. 12 months out from the start of an increment, we start working with the ESA Utilisation Planning Team Leader, Kirsten MacDonell. We help define the increment and work through any scenarios and issues that arise. Then we follow the real-time ops when the increment starts - and follow it through to completion and post-increment reporting. This means that we cover Real-time for six months at a time - and get a 1-year break from this intensity in between. Or, at least, that's how it's supposed to work.

We're a couple of months out from the end of Increment 63. Increment 63 ends when the 62 Soyuz undocks and returns to earth on 21 October (according to the current flight plan). Unfortunately for us, Simone, the RP-Team Lead fof Increment 63, has just accepted another job offer. This is great for Simone - but not awesome for Chloé and me, since we'll have to cover the Real-time operations in addition to our regular tasking. On Monday I'll start up for Simone. So I'm madly trying to wrap up everything that needs to get done with my regular work because I won't have so much time for it, starting on Monday.