Question: how do you ensure that your rockets/spacecrafts are safe and what does jaxa do after looking at the clouds

Aisling Shannon answered on 29 Feb 2016:

Inherently rockets are not safe, but a lot is done to ensure that the risk to people is minimized. Similarly for the spacecraft, my job is to make sure that all of the structures do their job. This could be things like the tank for the propellant, it has to be strong enough to survive all the vibrations of the rocket during launch. Or it could be that we have a very sensitive instrument on board that must not be rattled about during launch, so we make sure that the structure panel it is standing on can actually isolate it from those vibrations. Or even during the mission in space, we have gyroscopes that cause what are known as microvibrations, which are tiny compared to the launch vibrations, but could actually be a real problem when you are trying to operate the instruments (during the launch the instruments do not need to work, only when we get the spacecraft to its selected orbit do we switch it all on and start collecting data).
For the JAXA part, as for the ESA parts, the aim is to collect data, which is then available for researchers to use. They could use it to develop a model for weather prediction or they could use it for climate modeling… My role is not during that phase of the mission – most likely I will be working on another project by then…