About 19 men and women are presently working as SOMs on current and future ESA missions, comprising some of the most talented and qualified engineers in Europe. A SOM is assigned to each ESA mission, and he/she assembles a group of spacecraft engineers in each of the specialist areas, including power, thermal, telemetry & telecommand, to become the Flight Control Team, or FCT.  
 

	“SOMs must form a team and then take responsibility; they must really care. The flight control team must be highly motivated and it's the SOM who makes that happen.”

"SOMs must form a team and then take responsibility; they must really care. You are responsible to both internal and external customers and your mission might be valued between about 400 million and 1 billion euro. We don't want to lose any of these missions, so the flight control team must be highly motivated and it's the SOM who makes that happen," says Manfred Warhaut, Head of ESA's Missions Operations Department at the agency's European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany.
 
 
Career as SOM includes education and experience
 
There is no fixed path to becoming a SOM; while leadership and fundamental technical skills are shared in common, their educational and career backgrounds are as varied as ESA's expanding range of space missions demands.
 
 

	Andrea Accomazzo

Andrea Accomazzo, SOM for Venus Express until November 2006, initially trained as a pilot at the Italian Air Force Academy; he later studied aerospace engineering and worked at Fiat Avio, where he helped design the Vega launch vehicle and the Rosetta lander.

He joined ESA in 1999, working at ESOC on Rosetta; Venus Express is his first mission as SOM. "The science focus of Venus Express is tremendously interesting, but I love the engineering. It's incredible to think that we are orbiting Venus, a planet much closer to the Sun than Earth," he says. (In December 2006, Accomazzo will take over the SOM position for Rosetta.)
 
 

	Michel Denis

Mars Express achieves spectacular results
 
Michel Denis, SOM for Mars Express, comes from a small village in France's Limousin region. He studied bio-engineering in Paris, and then taught mathematics in Morocco for two years. Later, he obtained a master's degree and worked at a French technology firm, where he developed embedded software systems.

He joined ESA in 1992 as a flight control team engineer for Meteosat; he later worked on Cluster, Huygens and XMM-Newton. "I always had a passion for complex systems and processes, and the people behind them. This is how you make an aircraft safer, or how you prepare a space mission, which might represent a unique opportunity for Europe. And my interest in space has grown steadily since coming to ESOC," he says.

Denis recalls that Mars Express, launched in June 2003, experienced numerous challenges during initial operations and the cruise to Mars. "On rare occasions, a lot of effort is invested by scientists and engineers involved in MEX to prepare a special observation or operational improvement, but it only partly works because of a trivial issue due to a spacecraft hiccup, a human mistake - the best processes cannot fully avoid them - or an environmental issue like a solar flare," he says.

Nonetheless, Mars Express has gone on to become one of the most successful planetary exploration missions ever. Denis says that now, with the team's accumulated experience, "If the spacecraft can do it, we can do it."
 
 

	Juergen Volpp

Cluster boosts scientific understanding of Earth's space environment
 
Closer to home, Juergen Volpp is SOM for Cluster, a sophisticated magnetospheric mission comprising four identical spacecraft flying in formation and gathering data on how the solar wind affects the Earth.

Volpp studied physics in Heidelberg and helped to design the first European remote sensing satellite, ERS-1, before joining ESA in 1990; he has since worked on several scientific missions including Spacelab. He says the highlights of his job include working with a 'well-mixed' flight control team comprising many nationalities and young engineers as well as 'old timers'.

"The Cluster team spirit is strong and the level of cross-training is high; the individuals of this relatively small team are very motivated and there is no need to give directives; defining a common goal with a minimum of coordination is sufficient," says Volpp.

He also points to space research as a major inspiration: "Monitoring Earth climate and the atmospheres of other planets helps to understand the mechanisms causing atmospheric changes. Astronomy is an essential part of human culture. ESA's science programme enables European scientists to play a leading role in research into the fundamental laws of physics and cosmology."
 
 

	Micha Schmidt

SOM today for a mission of tomorrow
 
Micha Schmidt is SOM for a future mission, Herschel, scheduled for launch in 2008.

Schmidt has a degree in aerospace engineering and joined ESA in 1992. Even though launch is still a couple years off, he is already at building the flight control team and helping define future operational procedures and the overall ground segment that will work with the mission. The ground segment is the collection of systems, servers and infrastructure on Earth that supports a mission in space.

Herschel will be the largest space telescope of its kind when launched. Herschel's 3.5-metre diameter mirror will collect long-wavelength infrared radiation from some of the coolest and most distant objects in the Universe.

Schmidt says he also enjoys the international mixture of the team at ESA, and that the nascent but growing flight control team is "a bunch of knowledgeable guys I'm absolutely confident in."
 
 

	Octavio Camino

All missions eventually end
 
Until recently, Octavio Camino was SOM for SMART-1, ESA's first Moon mission. SMART-1 gathered much new scientific information about our nearest neighbour, and the mission also served as a technology demonstrator using a next-generation solar-powered electronic propulsion engine.

Camino comes from Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, in Spain, and joined ESA in 1992 after obtaining a master's degree in telecommunications. He describes the SMART-1 flight control team as "motivated, innovative and flexible," and pointed to the "ever-changing and challenging environment of space operations" as one of the most enjoyable aspects of his job.

"Exploring space is today more than an inspirational need for society; it is an indispensable tool for European policies ranging from the strategic need for providing and enabling European access to space, research and safety, to ensuring technological capabilities to develop and sustain Europe's industrial technology advantage in worldwide competition," he says.

The SMART-1 mission ended on 3 September 2006 when it underwent a controlled impact with the Moon, an event that itself provided additional opportunities for ground-based observers to learn about the Moon's surface. Camino will be reassigned as SOM for another mission in the near future.
 
 
Past missions, continuing success
 
As SOM for Cassini-Huygens, Claudio Sollazzo headed a seven-person Flight Control Team spread between ESOC and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in Pasadena, California.

The mission ended when the Hyugens probe made a spectacular touch-down on Saturn's moon Titan in January 2005, and Sollazzo's long association with the mission (14 years) makes him one of the central figures behind Huygens' success.
 
 

	Claudio Sollazzo

Originally from Naples, Italy, Sollazzo joined ESA in 1985, after studying astrophysics. He says having served as a SOM really sticks to you and becomes a permanent part of your professional life - even when your mission is over.

"One could say, 'Once a SOM, always a SOM'. You maintain wonderful and endearing memories of a job - hopefully - well done, and afterwards you must try and apply your hard-earned experience to another mission."

What makes a great SOM?

In June 2006, Alan Smith retired from ESA as a senior flight director after 30 years at ESOC and 41 years total in the space business. In an interview earlier this year, he described what it takes to be a great SOM:

"You've got to have good people skills, and be able to lead a team. You've got to motivate your team of perhaps six or eight engineers and that can be a challenge when a mission gets routine. And all missions experience problems that you just don't hear about – but they get solved. Someone has to take responsibility and make a decision, and that's the SOM."