Danielle Hecht Email & Phone Number

Pasadena, California

Mission Operations Systems / Ground Data System Lead for the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-3 (OCO-3), a NASA-JPL space instrument mounted on the International Space Station (ISS) and designed to measure the global distribution of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere.• Perform mission operations systems (MOS), ground data systems (GDS), software development, and verification & validation (V&V) tasks.• Develop and update GDS and MOS scripts to automate or streamline manual operator tasks; plot payload trending data; monitor payload telemetry; add functionality to sequence generation tools; and update command and telemetry dictionaries and configuration files.• Develop test plans, test cases, and procedures for verification and validation (V&V) of updates to flight software (FSW), fault protection (FP), and science sequence planning tools. • Perform functional and regression testing of FSW and FP updates prior to deployment to flight via generating simulator input files and operating the OCO-3 testbed.• Generate, test, and validate instrument pointing in the ISS solar array sweep space to collect calibration observations of the moon. • Generate, validate, and review weekly science sequences to be executed in-flight, taking into account ISS activities, such as attitude control maneuvers, visiting vehicle arrivals/departures, thruster firings and propellant purges, robotic arm operations, EVAs, etc. • Simulate ISS robotic arm maneuvers to evaluate the safety of instrument pointing during planned science observations.• Develop the timelines and procedures for critical payload activities such as payload power-cycles, thermal/decontamination cycles, and anomaly response.• Perform anomaly investigation, recovery, and reporting. • Command the payload via interfacing with the Huntsville Operations Support Center (HOSC) at MSFC.• Monitor the health & status of the payload.• Develop and present training material to new team-members.

Remote

On a team to design a Small Spacecraft Mission of Opportunity (MoO) to be deployed to a planetary surface via a balloon mission. Tasked with designing the science instrument and choosing the landing site in order to collect data pertinent to the study of extant life beyond Earth.

Boston, Massachusetts

On a team tasked with developing a model of the fleet acquisition and retirement process of airlines by analyzing economic, environmental, and operational factors with an unsupervised machine learning clustering algorithm, a predictive model, and policy/test scenarios.

Amsterdam, North Holland, Netherlands

Researched the potential for the addition of a mobile air-and-water-quality-monitoring-network on distributed Roboats. Analyzed the existing infrastructure of publicly available air-and-water-monitoring networks in the Amsterdam metropolitan area to justify the benefits to a decentralized network of sensors. Contributed to the visualization (JavaScript/CSS/HTML) of a high-demand ride-sharing network of cars in Manhattan as relevant to Roboats in canals of Amsterdam.

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Web development for the MIT Humanitarian Supply Chain Lab website to update their portfolio of research, education, and outreach initiatives. Contributed to outreach initiatives by promoting events for the Humanitarian Disaster Response Working Group speaker series across the MIT campus.

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Designed, built, and calibrated a distributed pressure sensor system to monitor usage of an off-grid infrastructure for disaster resilience in developing countries.

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Reviewed and graded undergraduate students’ problem sets for 16.001 Unified Engineering: Materials and Structures and 16.002 Unified Engineering: Signals and Systems courses.

Big Island, Hawaii; Cambridge, Ma

Collected UAV aerial images of farmland as well as geotagged ground-truth soil and leaf measurements to enable the testing of UAV applications for precision agriculture in identifying crop nutrient levels and crop growth limitations. Performed in-lab soil sample tests to determine the soil pH, salinity, nitrates, and levels of the primary nutrients, such as P, K, Ca, Mg, Na, and S, available to plants. Processed, georeferenced, and calculated the NDVI/DVI of UAV aerial images via ImageJ. Created contour plots of ground-truth nutrient levels via ArcMap. Correlated ground-truth nutrient levels with those estimates from the aerial images to evaluate the ability of remotely-sensed imaging to predict soil quality parameters. Presented research on individual occasions to the Mayor of the Big Island of Hawaii; the public at a Kona Science Cafe Monthly Series talk; the MIT Civil and Environmental Engineering department at a Ralph M. Parsons Environmental Sciences Seminar Series talk; and to a group of MIT alumni. Wrote the Results and Discussion section of a research paper submitted to the Soil Science Society of America Journal.

Westford, Ma

Operated Celestron C14 manual and automatic telescopes with CCD imaging for making photometric astronomy observations. Configured and aligned the telescopes to enable the collection of dark, flat, bias, and light images. Performed photometric data-reduction via AstroImageJ on images of Titan and several star clusters in order to produce light curves of Titan, and to measure the sensitivity of all telescopes under varying BVRI filters, respectively.Developed a procedure and wrote a tutorial (Python) on calibrating a Portable Instrument for Capturing Occultations (PICO) system and on measuring the system's performance metrics: gain, sensitivity, and dark current.

Cambridge, Ma

Assisted in testing an X-ray instrument prototype for measuring high-resolution, linear X-ray polarization in the soft X-ray band to ultimately enable the collection of high resolution images of quasar jets and active galactic nuclei. Operated, calibrated, and made mechanical adjustments to the instrument to test the performance of gratings, mirrors, and detectors. Utilized introductory IDL and LabView.