How does a Nasa Engineer use math?

Question

I was just curious :]
Like in their every day job how do they use it?

Answer 1

it depends on their exact role, but constantly, they'd use it all the time. designing skematics for space vehicles/probes/satelities, calculating orbits and timing optimal times for when to make course changes. any one of these things would be incredibly huge projects involving hundreds or thousands of complex math problems.

Answer 2

Correctly, one would hope.

:-)

Seriously, I think there is a wide range of math skills and math use among engineers. I once met a pretty smart guy from a large company who used to be a fairly gifted mathematician in his university days. He began a talk on job prospects and requirements in his company by saying that he hadn't used anything more elaborate than addition and multiplication since he had joined industry.

My experience is kind of similar. But very often this observation is based on the fact that an engineer could use rather complex math if he or she had to and it is academic knowledge and experience which allows them to get away without calculating anything much from scratch because they already know where to look up the correct answers!

It would be false to assume that someone who did not learn all the math that leads to those answers would actually be able to solve the kinds of problems engineers have to deal with.

And on the other end one can always find non-trivial problems which actually require quite a bit of math, sometimes even novel approaches and I would venture to guess that NASA engineers are exposed to those more often than engineers in industry.

A pretty good guideline is that ALL of what they teach in university as part of undergraduate and graduate classes should be accessible to an engineer on the job, should he or she need it. And probably some more. Even if they will never use what they had to learn, the learning experience trains the brain to function in ways that help with the job.

Answer 3

At my job, we actually use a program called Nastran, a highly sophisticated fortran code originally written by Nasa. Since the code was so useful, the federal trade commission requested that the code be made available for other companies to distribute to prevent a monopoly. I use this program every day to perform stress analysis on space vehicles. It involves a hell of a lot of linear algebra, calculus, differential equations and common sense addition and subtraction. You don't have to be a genious to be a rocket scientist. You just have to know the ropes once you get your foot in the door, that's it.

Answer 4

We use algebra every day. Calculus most every day. I use boolean algebra regularly to solve logic problems. Sometimes differential equations, linear algebra, and complex vector analyses are used. There are other higher forms of math used, also.

A lot of the more advanced math is performed using software such as MathCAD, Matlab, SPICE, ModelSim, and other softwares put out by companies whose products we use.

Even though the math problems may be solved using computers and those software packages, we still have to know the details of how they operate -- we still have to know how to do it "by hand", because if the computer (for what ever reason) gives a bogus answer, we have to be smart enough to recognize it and fix it.

How are they used? I use these maths to aid in designing electronics (avionics) for use by NASA, and then to aid in analyzing those designs to make sure they are very reliable, and can operate in the worst of conditions (like high vibration , very high and very low temperatures, high humidity, high radiation from space, and other bad conditions).

.