TENNESSEE STATE UNIVERSITY

CENTER OF EXCELLENCE IN INFORMATION

SYSTEMS ENGINEERING AND MANAGEMENT

CENTER FOR AUTOMATED SPACE SCIENCE

(CASS)

AUTOMATIC SPECTROSCOPIC TELESCOPE PROJECT

(AST)

PROJECT MANAGEMENT PLAN

AST-Plan-100

OCTOBER 21, 1999

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Project Management Plan

for

Automatic Spectroscopic Telescope (AST) Project

Prepared by:

_________________________________________

Bervil D. Davis, PhD. Date
Consultant
Pace & Waite, Inc.
Huntsville, AL

Concurrence:

_________________________________________

Joel A. Eaton, PhD. Date

Technical Manager
Automatic Spectroscopic Telescope Project
Tennessee State University

Approval:

_________________________________________

Michael R. Busby, PhD. Date
Director, Center for Automated Space Science
Tennessee State University

Approval:

_________________________________________

Augustus Bankhead, PhD. Date
Vice President, Academic Affairs
Tennessee State University

AUTOMATIC SPECTROSCOPIC TELESCOPE (AST)

PROJECT MAGEMENT PLAN

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PARAGRAPH PAGE

1.0 SCOPE 1

FIGURES ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------PAGE

1 AST Project Organization 4

2 AST Top Level Master Schedule 9

3 AST Level I Work Breakdown Structure 12

TABLES ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------PAGE

1 NOA Funding Requirements 10

2 Labor Hour Requirements 10

3 AST Project-Level Quality Records 13

PROJECT MANAGEMENT PLAN

For the

AUTOMATIC SPECTROSCOPIC TELESCOPE (AST) PROJECT

1.0 SCOPE

1.1 Introduction - This Project Plan describes top level requirements and overall approach to be utilized by the Tennessee State University (TSU), Center for Automated Space Science (CASS) in the implementation of the Automated Spectroscopic Telescope (AST). It complies with the requirements of NPG: 7120.5A, "NASA Program and Project Management Processes and Requirements". Changes to this document will be processed in accordance with the AST Project configuration management plan.

1.2 Identification - This Project Plan describes the approach to be used by TSU in the design, development, fabrication, integration, test and ground operation of the AST. The AST consists of 1) 2 meter telescope, 2) telescope control and tracking system, 3) telescope instrument head, 4) spectrograph, 5) CCD detector and 6) data handling/reduction facility. This ground-based, completely automated AST will serve as the proof of concept for autonomous space-based operations.

1.3 Background - The TSU Center for Automated Space Science (CASS) was selected in 1995 as a Minority University Research Center (MURC) under the NASA Minority University Research and Education Program (MUREP). NASA selected TSU on the basis of TSU’s competitive proposal. NASA and TSU initiated a five (5) year Cooperative Agreement in 1995 for the proposed CASS. The AST Project is one of the proposed initiatives within CASS and an integral part of the completely automatic observatory that constitutes the basis of the astronomical component of CASS. The CASS Center was proposed to utilize robotic photometric telescopes, an automatic imaging telescope, then under construction, and a proposed automatic spectroscopic telescope (AST) to perform research relevant to three of the then five NASA Strategic Enterprises: Space Technology, Scientific Research, and Mission to Planet Earth.

2.0 APPLICABLE DOCUMENTS

The documents listed in Appendix A form a part of this plan. They are the most current issue unless specified otherwise in the text.

3.0 ACRONYMS/DEFINITIONS

A Glossary of terms and Acronyms/Definitions are provided in Appendix B and C, respectively.

4.0 GENERAL

4.1 Project Summary: - The AST Project consists of one automated, ground based spectroscopic telescope, as described in paragraph 1.2 above. The telescope is being designed, parts purchased, manufactured, and packaged for shipment by TSU at the Williams Campus in Nashville, TN. The AST parts will be shipped to Fairborn Observatory, near Nogales, Arizona for assembly, testing and verification of its operational capability. Once its operation is satisfactorily verified, the AST will be used to achieve the specific goals identified below.

4.2 Objectives - The objectives of this completely automatic observatory are to: 1) make the observations and operation of observatories routinely more flexible and less expensive by automation; 2) conduct scientific research of interest to NASA; 3) obtain supporting observations to back up observations made with NASA satellite observatories; and 4) give capable young minority students a taste of NASA’s work at the very time they are making choices about the direction of their careers.

The fundamental performance goals are to successfully develop, test, and operate the TSU AST hardware within the schedule and resource plans agreed to by TSU and a NASA Technical Review Committee (TRC).

The specific goals of the AST are: 1) Map the lower chromospheres of cool super giant stars by observing eclipses of zeta Aurigae binaries in the optical by obtaining approximately 50 separate observations per eclipse over time spans of a few weeks, within the order of five to ten observations per night maxim; 2) Determine orbits of a wide range of spectroscopic binaries and triple systems, particularly those containing giant stars to determine masses of stars on the giant branch. These observations will be obtained over time spans of a few months to ten years, with stars sampled frequently enough to give 50-100 spectra around a star’s orbit; 3) Use Doppler images to decode the surface structure of highly spotted stars, distorted binary components, and accretion discs. For Doppler images of spotted stars, it will be necessary to obtain in the order of twenty spectra around the star’s rotational phase over a time span of a few days to a few weeks; and 4) Use fluctuations of stellar winds to restrict models for wind acceleration in cool giant stars. Since the stars are brighter than V=7 and require S/N equal to or greater than 100, exposures in the red would be 5-20 minutes.

4.3 Customer Definition and Advocacy - The AST Project will be performed under the technical over sight of the Chairman of the Technical Review Committee. The Associate Administrator for the Office of Equal Opportunity Programs (Code E) is responsible for NASA’s Minority University Programs, including the establishment and management of MURCs. NASA Minority University Research and Education Program (MUREP) Division (MURED-Code EU) at NASA Headquarters will monitor the benefits provided for the educational enhancement of under-represented minorities who are U.S. citizens in pursuit of advanced degrees in NASA-related fields.

4.4 Project Authority - The AST Project was authorized by a Cooperative Agreement issued by the NASA Minority University Research and Education Program (MUREP) Division at NASA Headquarters. TSU was designated as a Minority University Research Center for Automated Space Science (CASS). The AST was one of the three astronomical projects selected to be included in this Cooperative Agreement.

5.0 MANAGEMENT

5.1 Organization and Responsibilities

5.1.1 General - Project level authority for control of the objectives, resources, schedules, and responsibilities will be in accordance with the NASA/TSU Cooperative Agreement. The Associate Administrator for the NASA Office of Equal Opportunity Programs (OEOP) is responsible for the establishment and management of MURCs, including the TSU CASS. The Director of OEOP’s Minority University Research and Education Division has program management and oversight responsibility for developing all policies, procedures and guidelines as well as the approval of MURC budgets to ensure effective project performance and administration. A NASA technical officer, who is the NASA Historically Black Colleges and Universities Program Manager, has administrative and operational responsibility for overall monitoring of the CASS/AST progress toward NASA MURC goals. A NASA Technical Monitor who has technical oversight responsibility for the MURC, will chair the Technical Review Committee to ensure that an annual on-site review of the Center’s progress in implementing its technical program is achieving its education goals, and preparing its request for continuation funding is conducted and documented. This NASA Technical Review Committee will include discipline experts in the work being performed by CASS/AST. The source for project funding is the NASA OEOP. The overall project organization for the AST Project is shown in Figure 1.

5.1.2 TSU Responsibilities - Within TSU, the responsibility for the overall project management, hardware development, assembly, testing, and operations of the AST has been formally assigned to the TSU/CASS Director/CASS Principal Investigator (PI). The CASS PI will be assisted by the AST Technical Manager, who will have day-to-day responsibility for operating the project. AST Project oversight will be provided by the TSU Administration, namely, the President and Vice President for Academic Affairs.

The CASS PI will be responsible for managing and directing the overall Project and implementing interface activities with the appropriate project-implementation agreements. Specifically, the TSU/CASS Director (CASS PI) will serve as the overall TSU authority in interfacing with the NASA Internal Review Board and the Director of OEOP’s Minority University Research and Education Division (MURED). The AST Technical Manager, with concurrence of the CASS PI, will also have overall authority for Project activities with the Fairborn Observatory and with any other selected participants involved with accomplishing the goals of the AST Project. The Technical Manager will be responsible for overall project planning and control, and will be supported by the TSU Administration as required. The Technical

Manager will also chair the AST Project Configuration Management Control Board, which will control all changes to the baselined AST element configuration, cost, and schedule.

The Technical Manager will provide technical leadership and expertise in designing and developing the hardware, integration and operations activities. The Technical Manager will also develop, maintain, integrate, document, and update detailed science requirements and insure that the AST will achieve the desired scientific objectives.

5.2 Special Boards and Committees - The Project configuration will be controlled by a formal Configuration Control Board (CCB) as defined in the AST Configuration Management Plan. The structure, membership, and responsibilities of the CCB will be defined in this CM Plan. Special committees may be established by TSU as the need arises to provide specific technical, management, and scientific support. Special consultants will be utilized by TSU as required.

5.3 Management Support Systems - During all phases of the AST Project, the CASS PI and Technical Manager will closely monitor the development progress through periodic management reviews and specific design reviews to assess overall project status. The Technical Manager will chair a Project Configuration Management Control Board to control key milestones for all major project elements and the integrated Project Master Schedule. Schedules will be reviewed and updated monthly, and schedule trends will be closely monitored to identify high-risk areas. Detailed cost and manpower plans will be established and variances assessed monthly. The technical and resource performance data will be periodically incorporated into an integrated project risk assessment to determine overall Project progress and potential areas of concern so that appropriate actions can be taken in a timely manner.

The Technical Manager will be responsible for project management procedures required to identify, track, and status all project documents, and changes thereto from generation through the review and approval cycle.

6.0 TECHNICAL SUMMARY

6.1 Project Requirements - The 2-m AST consists of an 80-inch Cassegrain telescope coupled to an echelle spectrograph through optical fibers fed by a guiding head in the telescope. All of this is run by a control system that automatically schedules and makes observations from information sent over the Internet.

6.2 Systems - The AST operates as a system with an 80-inch telescope to collect light from celestial objects, primarily stars, an echelle spectrograph with three modes to form spectra of the light, a system of optical fibers to transport the light to the spectrograph in a separate enclosure, and a control system distributed over several computers to run the whole system without human observers.

6.2.1 80-inch Telescope - To accomplish the scientific program of CASS, the telescope must be able to acquire stars brighter than V=10 and track them for periods up to 20-30 minutes. The telescope TSU has designed and built for this purpose is a classical Cassegrain giving a final f-ratio of f/8 with the focus 18 inches in front of the 81-inch (2-m) primary mirror. The primary mirror is a Cervit mirror built in 1970 by Contraves for the Air Force, which became surplus around 1980. The focal-plane instrument for the telescope is a guiding head with an acquisition/guiding camera, a set of 200-micron optical fibers (signal fibers) to channel the light of stars into the spectrograph, and a calibration feed for channeling calibration light at f/8 into the signal fibers.

6.2.2 Echelle Spectrograph - To accomplish the most critical research under CASS, the spectrograph will have a basic resolution of about R=30,000, with two alternative modes, a high-dispersion mode (R near 80,000) and a low-dispersion mode (R near 700). The AST's initial scientific programs require observations in two wavelength ranges, the blue-violet (3700-4000A) and the red (6300-7000A). Observing wave lengths in between is desirable but not critical. Also, provided certain critical wavelengths are included, it is not absolutely necessary to observe all of every order of the echelle.

The preliminary design of the spectrograph is a white-pupil echelle with a f/7 input from a 200-micron optical fiber collimated to an 8-inch beam. This beam is dispersed by a 52.67 line/mm echelle grating (65.5-deg blaze) from Richardson Grating Lab operating close to Litrow (gamma=1.0 degree and theta=0). The dispersed beam is re-imaged onto a cross-dispersion grating by two concave mirrors and a folding flat. Cross-dispersion is by a large plane grating, specifically a Large Astronomical Grating from the Richardson Grating Lab (204 mm x 254 mm) with 250 lines/mm and a blaze angle of 4.5 degrees. The cross-dispersed beam is then projected onto the detector by a camera having a focal length near 20 inches (500+/-50 mm) and an aperture near 9 inches. This camera would ideally give images with about 10-micron (20-microradian) resolution over an area 30x55 mm to preserve the high-resolution mode of the spectrograph. The low-dispersion mode for use with fainter objects will use a separate input fiber feeding into the second re-imaging mirror, which serves as the collimator for the cross-dispersion grating.

6.2.3 The Detector - The detector is be a SITe ST002A 2kx4k CCD with 15-micron pixels, of which the project has two in hand (a grade 2 chip for the primary detector and an engineering-grade chip for a backup). This chip preserves two-times over-sampling at the highest resolution of the spectrograph. TSU will mount this CCD in a dewar with mechanical refrigeration for cooling and get San Diego State University to build the control system to run it and integrate it into TSU's instrument control computer.

6.2.4 Telescope/Instrument Control System - The AST is controlled by a computer system distributed over roughly three computers; (1) an executive/ instrument computer to run scheduling, manage the configuration of the spectrograph, and control the CCD detector, (2) a telescope-control computer to run the tracking of the telescope (motion control), to control stepper motors for controlling the mirrors and instrument head (guiding/acquisition), and (3) possibly a computer to manage the enclosures and power management.

6.2.5 Enclosures - The telescope will be housed in a specially designed building with a roll-off top section, the telescope enclosure. The motions of this building are provided by pneumatic control (air cylinders to lower the front wall and an air motor to move the top section on railroad rails). The air compressor for the building control and the observatory UPS will be in a separate utility building behind the telescope enclosure. The spectrograph and executive computer will be in a control enclosure just south of the telescope enclosure. All these enclosures were in place as of January 1, 1999.

6.2.6 Data-handling System - Data will be collected by the executive computer for reduction on site or transmission to TSU for reduction there. Transfer will be either over the Internet, if a reliable high-speed connection becomes available, or sent by tapes through the mail. Data reduction is by an adaptation of programs written by Jeff Hall of Lowell Observatory, adapted by him to reduce the spectra from the AST.

6.3 System Operations - Operations of the AST system consist of preparing lists of observations to perform, making those observations, retrieving and reducing the data, and distributing the resulting spectra for scientific analysis. The nightly operations of the telescope consist of observing a group of stars at various wavelengths and dispersions with the telescope scheduling the observations automatically from a list provided it, acquiring each star automatically, and then recording the spectrum automatically and depositing it in a computer file for processing the next day.

6.3.1 AST Control Center - The AST will be operated as an automatic telescope, as opposed to a remotely controlled telescope, from a control center at the Center of Excellence in Information Systems at Tennessee State University. This Center will be responsible for deciding what observations to make (to do the scientific program), for programming the telescope to make those observations, for reducing the data and archiving the resulting spectra, and for distributing the spectra to scientific researchers. The control center will also maintain facilities for developing new procedures for using the telescope and simulators for testing modifications to the control system.

6.3.2 Nightly Operations at Fairborn Observatory - A night's observing consists of five steps: 1) depositing a list of observations to make in the telescope's executive computer over the Internet; 2) opening the building and activating the telescope; 3) making observations of stars throughout the night; 4) closing the observatory before sun-rise; and 5) retrieving the spectra or reducing them on-site. Primary responsibility for deciding when to open and close the telescope enclosure shall rest with Fairborn Observatory and will likely be implemented by integrating the AST into the existing observatory-control system maintained by Fairborn. However, the AST will have the discretion of closing itself down if conditions warrant.

6.3.3 Maintenance - Fairborn Observatory will maintain the AST under a maintenance agreement established under Tennessee State's overall memorandum of understanding with Fairborn Observatory. TSU will develop quality-control tests of the data and telescope operations to assist Fairborn in diagnosing problems to be fixed, as TSU has done with its existing automatic photometric telescopes.

6.4 System constraints - The significant constraint on this system is data transmission between the observatory and control center at TSU. The current Internet connection has a low bandwidth adequate for transmitting photometric data but probably inadequate for transmitting spectroscopic or imaging data.

6.5 Ground Systems and Support - See 6.3.1 above.

6.6 Facilities - Facilities on campus at TSU include the labs of the Center of Excellence in Information Systems. These include roughly five computers dedicated primarily to the AST project, a lab/storeroom for collecting and assembling parts of instruments, a controls lab which may be used for some kinds of electronic assembly and testing, and further space in a large commons area for doing larger assemblies. Computers available to the project run such useful engineering programs as AutoCAD, ANSYS, IDL, and Microsoft Excel, and the planning program Microsoft Project.

The main external facilities available to the AST project are provided by Fairborn Observatory. Fairborn provides services for building and maintaining automatic telescopes, including siting, power distribution, communications, maintenance and adjustment, and security. TSU and Fairborn have developed the site for the AST and established an agreement to maintain it. Fairborn also has a shop on site with a small lathe, an excellent new milling machine, drill presses, sheet-metal tools, and extensive electronics tools.

6.7 Logistics - The main logistical issue in the AST project is whether to retrieve data from the telescope over the Internet or on magnetic tapes sent by mail, as discussed in 6.2.6 above.

6.8 Mission Results, Analysis, and Reporting - Spectra will be distributed to researchers for whom the observations are made from the TSU control center over the Internet. TSU will maintain an archive of observations in the control center for archival research and establish policies for releasing data for such research which maintain the integrity of the long-term sort of research the AST is designed to do. Results of the scientific investigations and statistics of the use of the AST will be reported in the CASS annual report.

7.0 SCHEDULE

The AST Project top-level schedule is shown in Figure 2. The corresponding detailed schedules were presented to NASA on June 29, 1999 and are adopted by TSU as the baseline schedules for the AST Project.

Figure 2 AST Top Level Master Schedule

8.0 RESOURCES

8.1 Funding Requirements - A summary of the estimated new obligation authority (NOA) funding requirements by quarter, from July 1, 1999 through June 30, 2001, which includes the completion of the development phase for the AST Project, are shown in Table 1. Monthly plans are available in the AST Project Office.

8.2 Personnel Requirements - The AST project is being implemented by a financial/ control officer, a technical manager/engineer, and a programmer/ instrumentation technician. They are assisted by various members of TSU Center of Excellence in Information Systems and Engineering Management with smaller, part-time roles for mechanical, programmer/ instrumentation technicians, and by numerous consultants. Table 2 provides the quarterly personnel requirements, in labor hours, to complete the development phase of the AST Project on June 30, 2001. The sum of this effort is approximately 3.1 man-years.

9.0 CONTROLS

9.1 Associate Administrator for OEOP - The AA for OEOP controls the establishment and management of MURCs, including the TSU CASS.

9.2 Director OEOP MURED - The Director of OEOP’s Minority University Research and Education Division (MURED) representative controls the development of all policies, procedures, guidelines and budgets for the CASS, including the AST Project.

9.3 NASA Technical Monitor - The Technical Monitor has the technical oversight control for the MURC, chairs the Technical Review Committee, and ensures that an annual on-site review of MURC progress in implementing its technical program, achieving its education goals, and preparing its request for continuation funding is conducted and documented. The NASA Technical Review Committee controls the following activities:

9.4 TSU Administration - The TSU Administration, President and Vice President for Academic Affairs, controls the implementation of the Project within the guidelines provided by the above-identified NASA officials to insure its successful implementation and completion.

9.5 CASS PI - The CASS PI will control the following activities:

9.6 Technical Manager - The Technical Manager will control the following activities:

10.0 IMPLEMENTATION APPROACH

10.1 General - Overall AST Project management, hardware design, parts procurement, assembly and functional testing will be done in-house at TSU CASS. All mechanical testing that may require physical modifications to the structure will be conducted in-house. The ability of the drive motors and control electronics to move the telescope through its full range of motions and the ability to use several motor encoders simultaneously to determine the telescope’s position will be tested in-house prior to shipment. After this successful testing, the AST will be packaged and shipped to the Fairborn Observatory, near Nogales, Arizona for final assembly, functional checkout and operational testing. The Arizona testing will include the integration of the telescope into its observatory and those tests that require observation of stars. The Arizona testing will be conducted at the Fairborn Observatory Facility by the TSU CASS AST Project personnel and the Director of the Fairborn Observatory, Lou Boyd. Mr. Boyd has worked with the TSU CASS for many years and is known to be a brilliant instrumentalist.

10.2 Implementation Agreements - The check out and testing of the AST in Arizona will be conducted under TSU’s Memorandum of Understanding with Fairborn Observatory.

10.3 Project Summary Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) - A Level 1 WBS for the AST is provided in Figure 3. An abbreviated AST WBS dictionary is provided in Appendix D. This dictionary provides a description of each element to be used as a “cost center” in the WBS.

10.4 Project Quality Records - The AST Project will maintain quality records pertaining to the project work elements. The Project-level quality records are listed in Table 3.

11.0 ACQUISITION SUMMARY

The AST hardware will be designed and constructed in-house, since no suitable telescope contractors were readily available and affordable. Individual parts have and will continue to be obtained from capable sources. The telescope mount was designed in house and most of the parts were made by the Y-12 plant at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which CASS hired after failing to get competitive bids from private companies. A set of mirrors was obtained from Torus Optics. The primary mirror was a surplus 81-inch f/1.5 Cervit mirror made for the Air Force in 1970. Purchases are made by fixed price Purchase Orders from TSU using drawings developed in house. The AST Project personnel closely monitor the manufacturing processes and deliveries.

12.0 PROGRAM/PROJECT DEPENDENCIES

The AST Project is dependent upon the continued funding support from the NASA Director of OEOP’s Minority University Research and Education Division. The Project is highly dependent upon satisfactory approval from the NASA Technical Monitor of the Project’s management and technical skills to accomplish the AST goals in a timely manner. Without satisfactory approval from these identities, the AST Project cannot survive.

13.0 AGREEMENTS

Approval of the AST Project Plan and continuation of NASA funding must be approved by the NASA Technical Monitor by July 1, 1999 to prevent further delay in the Project schedule.

14.0 PERFORMANCE ASSURANCE

14.1 General - The AST Project will implement adequate performance assurance measures, including quality, reliability and maintainability for meeting the overall performance objectives of the AST system.

14.2 Reliability and Maintainability - The AST Project is cognizant of the NASA STD 8729.1, “Planning, Developing and Managing an Effective Reliability and Maintainability (R&M) Program”, dated December 1998. However, the AST hardware will be designed for ease of replacement and maintainability. As a ground-based program, expensive, high reliability parts, with specific numerical reliability goals, will not be required. Selected vendors will use high quality materials and commercial standards in building the AST parts.

14.3 Quality Assurance - The AST Project is cognizant of the NASA Policy Directive, NPD 8730.3, “NASA Quality Management System Policy (ISO 9000)”, dated June 8, 1998. However, since AST is a ground-based program, it will be viewed as “non-quality sensitive”. But, the AST engineer(s)/technicians will, as a matter of practice, perform the following quality-type functions to assure that a quality product is used in all AST hardware: 1) inspect and approve all released drawings; 2) perform in-process and final inspection at the manufacturer, including final testing, if any, on all purchased hardware; 3) perform an acceptance inspection of all deliverable hardware and test data for compliance with identified requirements; and 4) review and approve all system test data. A copy of all inspection and acceptance records will be maintained by the Project.

14.4 System Performance Verification - Verification will be performed to ensure that the AST hardware and software meet all specified design, safety and performance requirements in accordance with the AST System Requirements document.

15.0 RISK MANAGEMENT

The AST Project will perform a risk management analysis in accordance with the requirements of NPG 7120.5A. Risk management is a continuous process that identifies risks; analyzes their impact and prioritizes them; develops and carries out plans for risk mitigation, acceptance, or other action; tracks risks and the implementation of mitigation plans; supports informed, timely and effective decisions to control risks and mitigation plans; and assures the risk information is properly communicated to all personnel having a need to know. Risk status assessment will be reported at major project reviews.

16.0 ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT

There is no known environmental impact from the AST Project activities.

17.0 SAFETY

The AST Project will meet the safety requirements as prescribed by the Tennessee State University. All incidences of unsafe conditions will be an agenda item for the AST NASA reviews.

18.0 TECHNOLOGY ASSESSMENT

The current AST Project is based upon using existing, proven technologies. Any identifiable new technologies will be reported in real time as the Project progresses.

19.0 COMMERCIALIZATION

As the results of the spectroscopic telescope are collected and studied, any applications for commercialization will be reported. Results of the AST observations will be documented, published and made public for all interested parties to study.

20.0 REVIEWS

20.1 Special Reviews - The NASA Internal Review Board will convene special reviews by technical experts as necessary. This board will serve as a conduit by which all reports and findings regarding TSU/CASS/AST are reviewed and forwarded to OEOP for action.

20.2 Project Reviews - Internal monthly reviews will be used to review and assess Project progress against planned milestones. Utilization of funds and man-hours will be compared to the planned usage. A total project assessment will be made, including system performance, with adjustments being made as required.

20.3 Design and Performance Reviews - A series of reviews will be conducted to determine that the design fulfills the established requirements, and that the as-built hardware complies with the requirements and design.

20.4 Preliminary and Critical Design Reviews - Preliminary and Critical Design Reviews (PDR and CDR) will be conducted for each major element of the AST as defined in the Master Schedule. The hardware/software configuration that satisfactorily completes CDR will be base-lined. All changes to this baseline will require approval of the Configuration Control Board. All approved changes will be documented against the baseline; thus the added changes establishes a new baseline.

20.5 Pre-shipment Review - Pre-shipment reviews will be held to certify readiness for shipment of the Project hardware to the ground test site in Arizona. These reviews will certify the as-designed versus as-built hardware assessment, the verification process and results, show that all applicable requirements have been met, status problem report resolution identify open work, and report on operational planning and team readiness. The reviews will incorporate Functional Configuration audits for certifying design meets requirements and Physical Configuration Audits for certifying as-built meets as-designed requirements. Verification that all hardware, software, and test results are included in the shipment.

20.6 Operational Readiness Review - The Operational Readiness Review (ORR) is the review by which the AST is certified as operationally ready to begin its ground operation mission. The ORR will include a summary of any pre-shipment review results and the certification of satisfactory closure of all problem reports and open work items since arriving in Arizona.

21.0 TAILORING

It is intended that the AST Project as described in this document follows the processes and requirements of NPG 7120.5A. No unique approaches are anticipated in the implementation of the AST Project.

22.0 CHANGE LOG

Changes to this Project Plan will be documented in a change log as shown in the front of this document.

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APPENDICES

APPENDIX A

APPLICABLE DOCUMENTS

NPG - 7120.5A NASA Program and Project Management Processess and Requirements

NPD - 8730.3 NASA Quality Management System Policy (ISO 9000)

NASA STD 8729.1 Planning, Developing and Managing an Effective Reliability and Maintainability (R&M) Program

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APPENDIX B

AST GLOSSARY

AST PROJECT The overall AST activity is to:

1) Map the lower chromospheres of cool super giant stars,

2) Determine orbits of a wide range of spectroscopic binaries and triple systems,

3) Decode the surface structure of highly spotted stars, distorted binary components, and accretion discs, and

4) Use fluctuations of stellar winds to restrict models for wind acceleration in cool giant stars.

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APPENDIX C

ACRONYMS / DEFINITIONS

AST = Automatic Spectroscopic Telescope

CASS = Center for Automated Space Science

CCB = Configuration Control Board

CCD = Charge Coupled Device

CDR = Critical Design Review

CM = Configuration Management

MURC = Minority University Research Center

MURED = Minority University Research and Education Program Division

MUREP = Minority University Research and Education Program

NPD = NASA Policy Directive

NPG = NASA Procedures and Guidelines

OEOP = Office of Equal Opportunity Program

ORR = Operational Readiness Review

PDR = Preliminary Design Review

PI = Principal Investigator

TRC = Technical Review Committee

TSU = Tennessee State University

UPS = Un-interruptable Power Supply

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APPENDIX D

ABBREVIATED AST WBS DICTIONARY

1.0 AST Project The AST Project consists of : a 2-m telescope, an Echelle Spectrograph, a Detector, Control system, Data-handling system, and Enclosures. These ground-based elements will be used to automatically map giant stars.

1.1 Project Management Includes all activities to manage and control the AST Project such as Project Control (schedule and resources), configuration and data management, procurement, quality management, and management reviews.

1.2 Systems Engineering Includes establishing overall system design requirements, specifications, systems analysis, safety, and reliability.

1.3 Science Includes establishing science requirements and overall design support.

1.4 System Hardware/Software Integration and Verification Includes the design, development, fabrication, assembly, test, systems integration and verification at TSU, plus shipment, assembly, and system verification at Fairborn Observatory.

1.5 System Operations Includes the set-up, checkout and operation of the Fairborn Observatory facility control center, total functional operation of the AST system, including preliminary observation of the stars and data analysis.