Risks that are not for us to take

History tells us that the old-time Japanese warrior caste, the samurai, had such a strong code of honor and such an unflinching loyalty to their feudal lord, their daimyo, that they would not only fight to the death in battle, but, in case there were questions of honor and obedience, they would also take their own life at a gesture of their lord to restore their good name (the so-called seppuku). Luckily, feudal society has been replaced by an industrial one where workers do not belong to their employers and just hired by them, and where workplace protection regulation are set in place so that the workers do not suffer long-term harm from performing the job.

One mayor drawback of the traditional neoliberalism is that entrepreneurs were at liberty of literally killing themselves on the job. Since they were their own bosses, there was no one to take responsibility for their excesses so the only potential source of control was the corresponding Department of Labor (or equivalent governmental institution), which was in general too busy fighting the abuses of big employers to get into the self-abuses of independent workers. However, with the arise and spread of the concept of personal branding more and more people are embracing the idea of themselves as a one-person company even as employees of a company, which often leads to cases of self-exploitation and the negative outcomes that derive out of it.

Photo: Tom à la rue

On Friday I played an unwilling role in an episode which was unpleasant but, luckily, did not have any unfortunate results. For some weeks we had been considering the possibility of feeding the light of the Sun into the chamber where the flight spare is used for software development. As a general rule, we use LED lamps to simulate the scenes that our telescope sees in space, but there are certain features that are hard to mimic. By using a wise combination of mirrors called a coelostat (or heliostat), the light of the Sun can be folded into a predetermined direction regardless of where the Sun actually is, similarly to the principle of the periscope of a submarine.

One obvious prerequisite for the use of the coelostat is to have a clear day, because otherwise the beam of light is disrupted by the passing clouds, and we have been out of luck for several weeks, but on Wednesday the morning was clear and Andy, our optical expert, set himself to work on the device. However, being in use only a few days per year, this device is not always at the top of its reliability and sometimes behave in an erratic way, so it failed to track the Sun and it just made it impossible to perform the test on Wednesday.

Thursday was again partially cloudy, but on Friday in was clear again and this time the coelostat "agreed" to track the Sun, so I got an email from Andy given me green light to start with the experiment. Not being aware that Andy was going to try to start the device on Friday I was at the doctor's office at the time, so it took me close to one hour to read it and start the testing. The first step was to check if the instrument received any light, so I took one image with the usual exposure time and it turn out to be saturated as expected, because the Sun is much brighter than any lamp in the lab. The second step was to let the telescope select an exposure time on its own, and it picked 27 ms, which is OK compared to the 10 ms we normally use in flight, since the atmosphere is not perfectly transparent and the mirrors and lenses in the coelostat also eat up part of the light. So I acquired a second image to confirm that the exposure was right and then started to heat up our narrow band filter, which is temperature sensitive, to put it at the temperature that we wanted to test. At this point I reported on the team chat the progress I had made and took my lunch break, since it takes between 30 and 60 minutes to reach a stable temperature (to +/-0.1 K). Shortly after my note, Andy realized that he had forgotten to put in the solar filter in the optical beam, so the coelostat was feeding the majority of the 1000 watts of sunlight per square meter into the instrument. With a round window of roughly 30 cm in diameter this amount to "only" 70 W, but this is still a lot for an instrument which is sitting in vacuum and with limited ways of dissipating that heat. Since I was not responding to email to confirm if the temperatures were rising in the instrument, Andy decided to stop the coelostat and end the test for the day.

The unpleasant part of the episode is not that he made a mistake (that can happen to anyone) but that his willingness to push the test ahead did away with the safety measures that should have been in place precisely to catch those errors. First, I should have been informed of his intention to give the coelostat a try, so that I could have followed his progress more closely. Second, we should have had a pre-test briefing to ensure that the test was doable in the conditions that we had (duration of the sunlight, human resources, etc.). And third, emergency contact information should have been shared, so that Andy could have called me on my cellphone the moment he had any doubts about the temperatures.

It is a well-known fact that you cannot reach greatness if you stop after every step you take, but burning an instrument with a price tag in the tens of millions does not lead anyone to anywhere. As much as he was willing to help the team, cutting corners was not a risk for Andy to take. This mistake could have meant a big loss for the whole team and the institute at large. Still, I do not blame him. The culture of clenching your teeth and push forward to please the boss is already ingrained in many of us, and is just another cog in the machine. But the management has to be aware that spreading the human resource too thin always ends up in this kind of self-exploitation that can very easily lead to expensive errors.

I have been known to pull the brake to the wild expectation of the scientists more than once. I understand that my responsibility to do things right has higher priority than my wish to do many things, particularly when rushing the work can result in big losses. That is a risk that is not for me to take. I have raised the flag to my own bosses and I hope that they take action before something bad happens, because it would be a very serious blemish for the institute's reputation. Have a nice week.