Question: Were you nervous when you led the build of the rover and the flight rover?

Abbie Hutty answered on 19 Feb 2020:

I think I was as much excited as nervous. Also a lot of the time I was too busy to be nervous.

You’re always a bit nervous about whether you’re making the right design decisions, or whether things will work properly, as no matter how much testing you do you can never be 100% and it’s a big responsibility.

But part of the job is about making everyone- yourself included – confident that your design will work and is the best possible solution. So you compare all the possible designs, and improve them, and test them, and things until everyone has enough evidence to be happy that it will work. So for the bits that I worked closely on, I know exactly what we have done to reduce exactly what risks to make sure there is only the smallest possible risk outstanding.

I actually find I’m more nervous now that I’m not working on the project every day, as I’m a control freak so now I’m not in control of things any more and I don’t know what is being done closely enough to be able to tell what risks there are still going on. And some of the events coming up in the rover mission – in particular the launch and the landing, are known to be the biggest risk of failure, as so much has to work all together for it to be successful. So those days I will definitely be very nervous!