2021-09-15: The Invisible Matters: How PM and SE Teamed to Build the world’s Largest IceCube (Illiff)
Date: Wednesday, September 15, 2021
Speaker: Randall C. Iliff
Randall C. Iliff explains how the South Pole is now home to IceCube, the world’s largest and arguably most unusual telescope. There are no mirrors or lenses to point, instead this telescope can observe in all directions at once. It is taller than the largest building, but almost completely hidden beneath the surface. The neutrino particles it “sees” are invisible, and virtually undetectable except in the extraordinarily rare event of a collision with the nucleus of an atom. IceCube occupies roughly a cubic kilometer of ice, and the thousands of devices within that ice must perform at spacecraft reliability levels. Construction and deployment took place in one of the most difficult working environments imaginable. Randy shares a true insider’s view of how the power of Program Management and Systems Engineering, working together in a process uniquely tailored for IceCube, enabled all of this to happen. It truly was a rare opportunity to observe the logic, tailoring strategy, and artifacts from one of the most remarkable development programs ever to take place.
