MER 2003/Athena Update Week Ending April 13, 2002

When the schedule starts to get tight on a project like this,
sometimes you have to start making some tough choices. And our
schedule is getting very tight indeed.

There’s a small problem in the electronics of our cameras, and its
result is that the pictures are a little bit more "noisy" than we’d
like them to be. Imagine a TV picture with some "static" in it. The
static is there in our cameras at a level far too low for the eye to
see, but we know it’s there.

Being fussy scientists and engineers, we’d love to get rid of that
little bit of noise. And we know how to do it. But the changes we’d
have to make would take something like five to ten days. And our
camera schedule is so tight now that any time we take to make the
cameras a little bit better will come out of the time we need for
critical testing over the coming months. So we have a choice: a
little more noise than we’d like, or five to ten days out of our
schedule. There’s a saying in this business that "better is the enemy
of good enough". And when the schedule is as tight as ours is, "good
enough" starts to look pretty good.