 Welcome to NASA and the Sailor Foundation's Space Systems Engineering course. Hi, I'm Jeff Felocin. I work here at Goddard Space Flight Center. I'm the project manager for a mission called the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, TESS. And what TESS is all about is looking out beyond the solar system to look at stars in the solar neighborhood that may have planets around them, not only planets, but Earth-like planets that are orbiting in what's called the habitable zone, close enough where they could sustain liquid water and potentially life. Very exciting mission. So I'm also an adjunct professor at Capital College here in Maryland and I teach system engineering. So I'm going to go along on this journey with you for these units and try to kind of guide you through some of the principles we use. And going from initial ideas like, boy, a scientist would really love to find habitable planets out around other stars, to how do I actually build an operating spacecraft that could actually do that? That sounds almost like an impossible thing to do. But using system engineering principles is something that's definitely feasible and achievable if you follow the processes. So kind of stay tuned and we'll kind of follow along and figure out how to do it. The goal of this course is not to make everyone a system engineer. You'll learn what that is, but not to make you a system engineer, but to make sure that engineers have a good system perspective and understand the tools and processes of system engineering. The course objectives for this course will include learning about what a system engineer does, what system engineering as a discipline is all about. It'll give you some idea of the role of teamwork in system engineering. It'll discuss the project lifecycle phases that are used to define the system engineering process, how you go from initial idea to final operational system. And we'll learn a lot about a lot of the specific tools and processes that go along with it, such as what you see there, defining the project scope and concept of operations, two terms that are key to understanding kind of the big picture of a system. We'll learn about some of the details of how to write requirements and develop requirements for a system, which are much more specific on how a system will need to operate. We'll learn a lot about trade studies and how during the decision making process, there's always many options in how you can develop a system and you'll go through some studies and analysis to figure out what's the optimal way. Hi, my name is Mike Menzel. I'm the mission systems engineer for the James Webb Space Telescope and I'd like to welcome you to the space systems engineering course. Systems engineering has been called the glue that binds things together. You know what happens if you don't have enough binding, things can get chaotic very quick. We hope that this course can show you some of the techniques that people have used to keep things together to make sure that the glue is the correct glue to design a good system and to keep a good system operative and testable and implementable. So I hope you enjoy the course. So although this course may not be able to teach everyone how to see the big picture, it can teach you the tools and skills that will facilitate you seeing the big picture. Along the way, you're going to be asked to do some assessments and they'll help you gauge your learning and they'll be deliverable at the end of the course and so that's going to be related to Mars sample return mission and you'll learn more about that as the course goes on as well as there'll be some live Google Hangouts with some of the NASA engineers and scientists that you'll hear along the way. These are people who apply the lessons of system engineering every day in their jobs. The course will be supplemented by readings and discussion questions at the end of each subunit as well to help you again gauge your understanding. Along the way, you're going to hear from a number of people that work in system engineering at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center including Mike Menzel, one of our mission system engineers who works on the James Webb Space Telescope project and also Nobel Laureate John Mather who's worked on many missions here at Goddard and they'll provide some real life examples of how space systems engineering works here at NASA. I'm John Mather. I'm the senior project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope and I'm here to welcome you to the course on space systems engineering. I think this is really important for you and for all of us because systems engineering is the process that takes an idea and makes it reality. So for you to learn that is to enable you to change the world.