Lessons in cat herding: methods used for managing a large international collaborative engineering project, the Ariel mission payload

The Ariel space mission will characterize spectroscopically the atmospheres of a large and diverse sample of hundreds of exoplanets.. Ariel is an ESA Medium class science mission (M4) with a spacecraft bus developed by industry under contract to ESA, and a Payload provided by a consortium of national funding agencies in ESA member states, plus contributions from NASA, the CSA and JAXA. With the payload being provided by a consortium of scientific institutes and industrial partners funded through their respective European national funding agencies, and additional contributions provided by ESA, NASA, CSA and JAXA, the coordination and management of this team is vital to the successful delivery of the mission. This paper will describe how we have tailored the standard systems engineering approaches taken for space instrumentation and implemented these in the large consortium structure. This has been done in order to try to maximise the efficiency of the consortium work and to allow as close to a seamless flow of information as possible. We outline the key tools being deployed by the payload management, systems engineering and product assurance teams in the consortium.