NASA SYSTEMS ENGINEERING BEHAVIOR STUDY

As a general rule, the number of engineers and engineering sub-disciplines needed to develop a particular instrument system is determined by its performance requirements as well as whether the work remains in-house or is contracted out-of-house. For larger, more complex instruments requiring a variety of engineered sub-system components, the integration and coordination of project sub-teams is essential. This increasingly critical role is performed by a small, uniquely skilled group of individuals known as Systems Engineers (SE). The different roles of a systems engineers, or specialties, include:

Mission Systems Engineer (MSE), Spacecraft Systems Engineer (SSE), Ground Systems Engineer (GSE) and Instrument Systems Engineer (ISE). There are various titles, but basically systems engineering could be the systems engineer overseeing the entire mission as a whole or the various subsets or systems within the system. Typically, the MSE directs the technical aspects of the mission and then has SSE, GSE and several ISEs to help build the spacecraft, ground systems and the various instruments for the mission.

In his March, 2007 address at Purdue University, System Engineering and the “Two
Cultures” of Engineering, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin characterized System
Engineering is both an art and a science: The development of formal methods has not altered in any way the fundamental nature of design, which still depends, as it did in antiquity, upon the generation of a concept for a process, technique, or device by which a given problem might be solved.

The engineering sciences have provided better, and certainly quicker, insight for the designer into the suitability of the concept than can be provided
solely by building it and examining its performance in its intended application.
But a human being must still intuit the concept. (Griffin, 2007)