I would like to thank the entire SDO team for an outstanding Phase A effort 
which officially concluded this Wednesday with the NASA HQ Code S EPMC 
approval to enter into Phase B.  The Initial Confirmation Review went very 
well with commendations from the EPMC.  The Project signed the Startup MOA 
between SDO and the IV&V Facilities.  Also, congratulations to Pete 
Gonzales for getting the Code 400 Rookie of the Year peer award.

On the systems/subsystems front, we participated in an all day meeting with 
AETD & GPM to discuss architecture, commonality, resources, etc.  The 
meeting went very well and should lead to resolutions on key topics & 
improvements in communication among all parties.  Evaluation testing of JSB 
100 amp-hr test battery and AEA 80 amp-hr test battery continues with the 
JSB battery nearing the end of 1st eclipse cycle with no issues identified 
to date (70% DOD at 60 amp discharge rate).  The AEA battery is still 
operating in solstice period.  For the SAFT test cells, battery buy off is 
10/17/03.

The Mission Assurance (MA) team completed the review process associated 
with Lockheed Martin's MA documentation.  LMSAL provided their responses to 
our questions which have clarified/addressed our concerns.  The Reliability 
Team is In the process of developing the Product Breakdown Structure (PBS), 
which is a hierarchical listing of all the hardware down to the card level, 
for SDO.  This PBS will be helpful to the Parts Engineer and Reliability 
Engineers in tracking availability of parts lists and potential Single 
Point Failures, along with efforts to reduce mission risk.  The SDO Parts 
Engineer is working with EVE on getting parts total dose rad-tested for the 
University of California's part of the EVE instrument.

The CM & Project Support team completed the document module of the SDO 
intranet database & are in the process of preparing access for all the SDO 
team members.  We approved SDO-CCR-020 (class 2 change to MAR related to 
GSFC parts derating requirements) and SDO-CCR-019 (Accelerated Start of MIT 
Lincoln Labs (LL) Charge Coupled Device (CCD) Development Phase for EVE 
Detectors).  As part of the FY04 Workforce Exercise, all Statements of Work 
requesting manpower in support of SDO have been developed and submitted to 
the appropriate organizations. Those organizations have until September 24 
to prepare their responses to SDO's requests.  Some SDO members attended: a 
lunch and learn seminar on Perspectives on Cost and Schedule Drivers on 
Projects presented by Bill Townsend and sponsored by the PAAC II contract; 
& the Work Breakdown Structure/Chart of Accounts (WBS/COA) Workshop as part 
of the on-going process of learning the new IFM Program.

Thanks,
Ken

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