Preparing to Launch Landsat 9

By Kelly McSweeney

How many things can go wrong with a spacecraft? As a systems engineer at Northrop Grumman, Mitch Sangalis asks himself exactly that every single day.  He focuses on fault management for Landsat 9 — the latest satellite in the nearly 50-year-old Landsat series – Landsat 1 launched in 1972. In that role, he thinks about all the possible ways that the spacecraft could break. You could call him a professional pessimist, but in thinking of all the ways things could go wrong, Sangalis is helping to make them better.

Together with the fault management team, Sangalis puts mechanisms in place to have an automatic backup plan for any disaster scenario. After all, if something goes wrong during the launch or in orbit, they won't be able to repair the satellite when it's in space.