Yeah, I agree that Duke will probably never fire Cut - he was an incredible hire for them.
I have been working on Parker Solar Probe for the last 5-6 years - full time since 2015 when the MESSENGER program ended. We launched last year in August and just completed our 3rd close approach ("Encounter") to the Sun. Our first 3 encounters have been at 0.17 AU to the sun. On Dec 26 we are going to do a Venus fly by maneuver that will reduce our orbit even further - down to 0.13 AU. We will keep doing a Venus flyby for every 3 Solar Encounters and further reduce our perihelion as the mission progresses. We plan on operating the mission through 2025, as long as the spacecraft holds up. The Lab just won the huge Dragonfly mission to Titan, so everyone here is excited about that. I would love to work a little on that mission, obviously. We are also partnering with JPL on the Europa Clipper mission, but I am not involved in it, at this time. What has been going on at Marshall?
Oh yeah, I recall now that you are working Solar Probe. MFSC has been involved with Solar Probe in our space environments group, doing some testing and so forth. One of the folks involved in that is a big UT fan and friend of mine.
As for me, I have been doing a small project called Near Earth Asteroid Scout for almost 6 years now. It's a solar sail mission that is a secondary on Artermis 1 (first flight of SLS). We have just begun final spacecraft integration. We have been delayed repeatedly by SLS launch slips, but have had our own hardware and software issues. One thing is, NASA tends to put young inexperienced people in the project office for small projects so there was a learning curve for the PM and LSE, unfortunately. We are on a good track now though. Recently just within the last few months solar sails have had a good run. We just won a Phase A project called Solar Cruiser to launch a large (1667 m^2) solar sail as a secondary tech demo on the IMAP mission, although there will be a down select in 9 months, so no guarantees it's "real" yet. Also the Planetary Society launched LightSail-2 back in June, and we have a Space Act Agreement with them to analyze flight data so I've been doing some of that. We just won Solar Cruiser in August, and we think that LightSail-2 launching when it did probably helped win the proposal.
Also Langley has a solar sail project called Advanced Composite Sail 3 or ACS-3 that they want to launch in 2021, and I just got back from a trip there a couple weeks ago to discuss MSFC participation in their project.
Solar Probe is a pretty amazing mission, getting that close to the Sun. I am pretty familiar with it. I sat in on Messenger reviews for the Venus and Earth gravity assists, as well as the first Mercury gravity assist, back in the day. My MS from Purdue was on gravity assist trajectories, in fact, so I have been following Solar Probe. Speaking of Messenger, the GNC lead for Mercury Messenger was someone I got to know fairly well, and he gave us some good advice on how to manage reaction wheel momentum for NEA Scout. I didn't do a lot on Messenger, but did enjoy what I did.
Dragonfly is a really cool mission. They announced that when I was at GSFC for a symposium on cubesats hosted by GSFC Science Directorate, and the attendees from APL were pretty excited, and should be. Hope you get a chance to work that one, it's pretty far out, would be something good to pick up after Solar Probe maybe.
