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Airline safety programs are created to achieve specific objectives. There are many excellent safety programs related to training (e.g., AQP, ASAP), each addressing specific requirements of an organization’s operational needs. The best program will be ineffective in terms of safety benefit, effectiveness, and economic costs if not considered in a system frame of reference. Most notable to the success of an aviation safety plan is the organization's culture, especially its safety culture. In this paper, we will address the content and training portion of Safety plans in a top-down systemic way, to include safety culture and several of systems and organizational aspects to safety plans.

The desire to move high-energy Pulsed Power systems from the laboratory to practical field systems requires the development of compact lightweight drivers. This paper concerns an effort to develop such a system based on a plastic laminate strip Blumlein as the final pulse shaping stage for a 600 kV, 50ns, 5-ohm driver. A lifetime and breakdown study conducted with small-area samples identified Kapton sheet impregnated with Propylene Carbonate as the best material combination of those evaluated. The program has successfully demonstrated techniques for folding large area systems into compact geometry's and vacuum impregnating the laminate in the folded systems. The major operational challenges encountered revolve around edge grading and low inductance, low impedance switching. The design iterations and lessons learned will be discussed. A multistage prototype testing program has demonstrated 600kV operation on a short 6ns line.

ChemCam is one of the 10 instrument suites on the Mars Science Laboratory, a martian rover being built by Jet Propulsion Laboratory, for the next NASA mission to Mars (MSL 2009). ChemCam is an instrument package consisting of two remote sensing instruments: a Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectrometer (LIBS) and a Remote Micro-Imager (RMI). LIBS provides elemental compositions of rocks and soils, while the RMI places the LIBS analyses in their geomorphologic context. Both instruments rely on an autofocus capability to precisely focus on the chosen target, located at distances from the rover comprised between 1 and 9 m for LIBS, and 2 m and infinity for RMI. ChemCam will help determine which samples, within the vicinity of the MSL rover, are of sufficient interest to use the contact and in-situ instruments for further characterization.

The Mars Science Laboratory will be the next Martian mobility system that is scheduled to launch in the fall of 2011. The ChemCam Instrument is a part of the MSL science payload suite. It is innovative for planetary exploration in using a technique referred to as laser breakdown spectroscopy to determine the chemical composition of samples from distances of up to about 9 meters away. ChemCam is led by a team at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Centre d'Etude Spatiale des Rayonnements in Toulouse, France. The portion of ChemCam that is located inside the Rover, the ChemCam Body Unit contains the imaging charged-coupled device (CCD) detectors. Late in the design cycle, the ChemCam team explored alternate thermal design architectures to provide CCD operational overlap with the Rover's remote sensing instruments. This operational synergy is necessary to enable planning for subsequent laser firings and geological context.