NASA science missions are often complex systems of systems, involving various stakeholders, including the United States’ Congress. To ensure a clear and concise communication of expectations, requirements, and constraints, NASA has adopted the Science Traceability Matrix (STM). STM provides a logical flow from the decadal survey to science goals and objectives, mission and instrument requirements, and data products. STM serves as a summary of what science will be achieved and how it will be achieved, with a clear definition of what mission success will look like. In this seminar, I will present the STM from the Parker Solar Probe (PSP), including requirements relating to the plasma instrument for which I am a co-investigator. I will describe how our team used the STM to map the mission’s top-level requirements to mission success criteria and helped to eliminate any single point of failure that could end the mission prematurely. I will then present my own research on magnetic switchbacks in the PSP magnetic and plasma observations and their role in solar wind acceleration and heating. I will conclude the seminar by discussing how my research on the temporal evolution of switchbacks in the solar wind led to a new STM, and helped to chart a multidisciplinary path to designing a ground-breaking science mission concept, titled Space Weather Investigation Frontier (SWIFT), with the potential to improve space weather forecasting lead times by up to 40%.
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