Meet Dextre the Robot

Recently on the Moth podcast I listened to On Approach to Pluto by Cathy Olkin, a scientist who worked on NASA's New Horizon's mission to Pluto.  It brought back some memories of my own flight support experiences when I was still working as an engineer for MDA, the company that built the Canadarm.  My job there for the first five or so years was focused on systems integration and testing of the Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator (SPDM), or Dextre, which was supposed to be more media-friendly.  Note that no one called it Dextre.  

The SPDM is a two-armed robot equipped with various tools to perform repairs on the International Space Station and can be operated while attached to the end of the Canadarm.  Below you can see it at the tip of the Canadarm on the newest Canadian five dollar bill.  No, it didn't make it onto the twenty but it's still pretty awesome.  A cool and little known fact:  Many of us at MDA who worked on the SPDM were allowed (informally?) to sign our names onto the hardware just prior to it being shipped down to Florida for launch.  You can't see the signatures as they are covered by the white thermal blankets but it's a pretty neat thought to know there is something out in space with my signature on it.

Five dollar bill showing the SPDM on the tip of the Canadarm

The SPDM launched on March 11, 2008 on STS-123 and a handful of us from MDA supported the assembly and commissioning of the robot on that mission.  I was used to doing flight support for the Canadarm from the Canadian Space Agency from Montreal but it was my first time supporting operations from the Johnson Space Centre in Houston.  At that point I had yet to see a shuttle launch and the Space Shuttle program was coming to an end in 2011.  Four of us from MDA were being sent down to Houston to support the mission - one to cover each shift, and our chief engineer was a floater to be on whichever shift had the most action on a given day.  We pleaded with our managers to let us fly to Florida first to watch the shuttle launch before heading down to Houston but we were denied permission.  Launches were frequently delayed due to weather and they couldn't have us hanging around Florida when we needed to be answering last minute questions about the mission back at home.  In the end STS-123 did in fact launch as planned without delay (fist shaking at our managers) and we flew down to Houston to begin what was ultimately a successful and very eventful mission to assemble the SPDM and perform all initial checkouts.

Below is an email I dug up which I wrote from my hotel room to family and friends towards the end of that mission.  I got a kick out of reading it again today almost a full decade later.

************  Monday, March 17, 2008  ********************************************

Hey guys,

Just thought I'd share some excitement with you.  I'm more than half way through the SPDM 1J/A launch mission where I'm doing flight support from the Mission Evaluation Room (MER) in Houston.  If you've been paying attention to the news at all you'll know that we've been having loads of problems launching and installing and powering our robot SPDM (that I've tested since I started working at MDA).  

Yesterday I pulled a 15 hour shift trying to analyze data for multiple brake failures we experienced.  It got to the point where everyone involved in the mission was calling on the phones and voice loops at once wanting an explanation. I have a headset but wasn't the person who talked on the voice loops, however I supported our chief engineer from the neighbouring console. Then the Flight Director, Dana Weigal, requested a meeting with MDA Engineering (that's us!) because she needed to be convinced there wasn't a problem before she would allow the ops to continue. This doesn't normally happen because there's another level of engineering at NASA that separates us from the Flight Director but our chief engineer and I are supposedly the "experts" for this brake test on this specific robot.  

We were told we had only 40 min to put together a short presentation...and then our chief engineer and I got called into the Flight Control Room! It was SO COOL...but my hands were a bit shaky and I hadn't eaten or slept in hours.  People doing flight support from Houston and Montreal said they saw me on NASA television talking to the Flight Director.  I'm going to see if someone can get that part of the video for me since they record everything.  

After that we stayed for meeting after meeting after meeting, went back to the hotel to sleep for 4 hours and had to come back for 6 hours of more meetings to convince the Station and Shuttle managers that we were good to go and there was no impact to the mission.

Check out the email below, from the manager of the SPDM program at the Canadian Space Agency.  Pay attention to the last sentence :D This was sent out to a wide distribution in Houston, Montreal and back at Brampton.  That experience was well worth the lack of sleep over the mission so far.  I should be coming back to Toronto around Good Friday.

Danielle

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I then attached an email of congratulations from Dan Rey, the SPDM program manager, who had mentioned the chief engineer and me by name for our "amazing work done in short order to avoid any impacts to the mission timeline."  

A few things I still remember from that mission:

1.  When it was time for the chief engineer and I to present to  the flight director (recall, this doesn't usually happen as the Flight ROBO typically is the middle-man between engineering and the FD) I assumed we were being led into a small meeting room and was floored when we stepped into the Flight Control Room where (obviously) the FD would be. Flash to Apollo 13 with Tom Hanks - we later toured the actual control room for that mission.

2.  While meeting with the flight director our chief engineer did most of the talking with minimal support from me.  However we happened to be standing in the path of one of the NASA cameras in a way which only had the flight director and myself in view (I later heard from colleagues who saw me on screen).  It looked like I had had a private meeting with the FD!  They never were able to pull the footage for me to see unfortunately.

3.  We had a great time riding rollercoasters at the nearby amusement park on our days off.

Eyes a little bloodshot from too many hours analyzing data

Numerous calls to troubleshoot failures during post-assembly testing

Vising the Flight Control Room again on our last day (Flight ROBO didn't look amused)

Riding rollercoasters between shifts

Stick 'Em Up!

For my first pregnancy my husband and I attended prenatal classes and learned about all sorts of things that never ended up being put to practice during actual labour.  I do remember the teacher emphasizing that women didn't usually have their water break like in the movies - that in many cases women had to have their waters broken during labour or that even if it did break on its own it would usually be a trickle or small leak as opposed to a gush.  That put my mind at ease.  

Turned out however that my water did break on its own (two weeks early, might I add) and it did gush like in the movies and baby was born eleven hours later.  Fortunately my water broke in the middle of the night when I was in the privacy of my own home and not earlier that afternoon when I was taking the crowded Dufferin bus.  They would have had to burn my seat.  I recall distinctly being woken up at 3am in a panic and calling out to Mike "Either my water just broke or I peed myself in bed!"

Fast forward to my second pregnancy when I was paranoid about my water breaking once baby had dropped at the 36-week mark.  I started sitting on seat covers in the car while driving, or towels on the sofa while lounging.  Late into my third trimester during my nesting phase I felt an urgency to reupholster all of our dining chairs (go figure).  Once they were finished you can bet I wasn't going to chance an accident on the new fabric.  

However this second time around I went into labour at 40 weeks without my water breaking which really threw me.  I didn't know if my mild contractions were actually a sign of labour or not.  I've heard that doctors/midwives will often break the waters during labour as a way to speed up the process.  This was not necessary in my case because (as I wrote in my previous post Labour of Love) baby was delivered only two hours after arriving in hospital.  In fact, my water didn't break at all until baby was already entering our world.

My husband described our newborn baby as looking like a bank robber when he was delivered.  It's probably safe to say this isn't the image a mother has in her head of what her newborn will look like.  His head and shoulders were encased in the amniotic sac which my midwife only broke open when the baby was half-way out.  The membrane ended up clinging to his face like a mask which was then easily removed after birth.  I have since read about how rare this situation is, to have a baby born "with a caul".   Apparently it is more common for babies to be born "en caul", which is when the baby is still entirely encased in the amniotic sac after birth.  That isn't intuitive to me as it seems like an even rarer occurrence to have the entire sac still in tact after birth.  The reason is that premature (and hence smaller) babies account for many of the "en caul" births.  According to Wikipedia babies born either with a caul or en caul account for fewer than 1 in 80,000 births.  So it seems our little chub-chub is special in even more ways than I could have expected.

I found it so amusing to read about the superstitions surrounding caul births due to their rarity.  In some cases people born with cauls were thought to have second sight, the ability to see what will happen in the future or what is happening in another place.  The History section of Wikipedia is also a fun read so I thought I'd include it below:

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In medieval times the appearance of a caul on a newborn baby was seen as a sign of good luck.  It was considered an omen that the child was destined for greatness. 

Gathering the caul onto paper was considered an important tradition of childbirth: the midwife would rub a sheet of paper across the baby's head and face, pressing the material of the caul onto the paper. The caul would then be presented to the mother, to be kept as an heirloom. Some Early Modern European traditions linked caul birth to the ability to defend fertility and the harvest against the forces of evil, particularly witches and sorcerers.

Folklore developed suggesting that possession of a baby's caul would give its bearer good luck and protect that person from death by drowning. Cauls were therefore highly prized by sailors. Medieval women often sold these cauls to sailors for large sums of money; a caul was regarded as a valuable talisman.

Not all cultural beliefs about cauls are positive. In Romanian folklore, babies born with a caul are said to become vampires upon death.

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I noticed that that last point was missing its citation so clearly it can't be true ;)