Arvid Croonquist

Arvid Croonquist brings years of experience preparing instruments for flight on the International Space Station and before that the Space Shuttle, sounding rockets and NASA’s zero-gravity aircraft. As PSE one of his key roles is to ensure the team communicates – that the physicists are exchanging information that engineers are absorbing and vice versa. This communication extends outside the CAL Project and JPL to working with the ISS interface engineers and safety experts to ensure CAL deliverables and their operations pose no risk to astronauts, the Station or other payloads. A final aspect of this emphasis on communications is the capturing of agreements, requirements and interfaces in documents that can be accessed by all.

JPL has many lessons learned from its decades of experience and associated best practices. A fun part of my job on CAL has been to identify which of those practices we will follow for our work because they will add value and which we choose to not accept.

Because CAL is a facility on the International Space Station the Project has the opportunity to have the astronauts remove and replace some of its components. This has allowed CAL to keep performing science. The ground team develops identical or improved hardware to keep the facility running.