Move to Calgary, Explore the Universe, and Maybe Save the Earth from Destruction

[beamjockey]

Job opening for the NEOSsat asteroid-hunter spacecraft:

An Operations Manager is sought for the Near-Earth Space Surveillance (NESS) project’s use of the Near-Earth Object Surveillance Satellite (NEOSSat). This spacecraft is a dual use mission between the Canadian Space Agency and Defence Research and Development Canada with launch currently planned early in 2010. The successful candidate will work at the NESS Data Operations Centre in the Department of Geoscience at the University of Calgary.

Professional activities and responsibilities of the Operations Manager will include evaluating all mission observation scenarios using STK (and other as necessary) software, evaluating follow-up intervals for asteroid discoveries, establishing collaborations to form a ground-station, astrometric, follow-up network (and being qualified to use the University of Calgary’s telescopes), establishing data archiving and reporting procedures and an alternate data processing site, and supporting the Mission Planning System development and operations at Defence Research and Development Canada Ottawa.

Looks like they could also stand to hire somebody to sprinkle a little more content on the project's Web site. Good technical overview in this PDF.

Near-Earth asteroids spend a lot of their time in the regions of the sky near the Sun. But ground-based telescopes work only at night, therefore looking away from the Sun. A space-based telescope, even a 15-centimeter one, can be very useful in reaching those missing parts of the sky, both for discovering new objects and for following up on objects discovered by other observatories.

Comments

[wcg.livejournal.com]

That's a job that's made to order for me, but I don't want to bail out of where I am with only six years to go before I can retire. Also, Calgary is a long way from the rest of the space-based astronomy community.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

That's a job that's made to order for me,

That thought had occurred to me.

Also, Calgary is a long way from the rest of the space-based astronomy community.

This is an argument whenever somebody wants to start a new center of something. Argonne in the 1950s, and later Fermilab in the 1960s, were a long way from the East Coast and West Coast powerhouses of accelerator-based physics. But they gave Midwestern universities a chance to participate in the game. The Midwesterners won the siting battles.

[wcg.livejournal.com]

If space-based astronomy were a robust field right now, it'd make more sense to expand further. As it is right now there are regional efforts at Univ. of Wisconsin in Madison and at Univ. of Colorado, as well as the big NASA centers at Goddard and JPL. The crap shoot involved with moving to Calgary for this is that the person who goes there will almost certainly end up moving away from Calgary when the mission is over if they want to continue in the field of space-based astronomy. I'm watching this play out right now with Johns Hopkins. They built a beautiful ops center for FUSE, but now they haven't been given a follow-on mission, even though FUSE met all its goals on time and under budget. So they're stuck with a facility (and a ground station in Puerto Rico) that they can't use.

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Also? Someone's smoking dope if they think they're going to get the skill set they want for $68k per year. Mission Operations Manager jobs start at $100k around here, and I don't think Calgary is that much cheaper a place to live.