Imagine you work for the MMS mission. Your goal is to measure how the sun's
and Earth's magnetic fields connect and disconnect. Explosively transferring
energy from one to the other. We call this magnetic reconnection. We
want to get a 3d observation of magnetic reconnection. To do this you'll need
measurements at four different points, a single base point and one additional
point for each dimension. This means you have to build not one but four
spacecraft. And you'll need to pack each one with 25 instruments. You'll need to
arrange them so that they are not blocking each other and so that the
magnetometers are held safely away from the spacecraft's body. But wait you only
have four years to build test and launch all of them. It typically takes four
years to build just one. So you won't be able to build them one at a time. You'll
have to work on them concurrently. You'll need a team to help you do that. They
will need space to work so you'll have to build a cleanroom. And you'll have to
keep all of your people paper and tools organized, because you'll have to wrap
four sets of wires, and prepare four sets of flight hardware, and do four sets of
tests, and make sure that everyone is working on the right project at the
right time. And now it's time to get to work.
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