‘We’re lucky someone wasn’t killed’: A look at the patent office’s Christmas outage; Fed Scoop, 7/13/16

Whitney Blair Wyckoff, Fed Scoop; ‘We’re lucky someone wasn’t killed’: A look at the patent office’s Christmas outage:

"The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s massive data center outage last Christmas was more than just an inconvenience, said the agency’s chief tech exec — it could have been deadly.

“Metal vaporized, doors blown off hinges ... we’re lucky someone wasn’t killed,”John Owens, the chief information officer of the Patent and Trademark Office, said at a Patent Public Advisory Committee meeting in a harrowing account that sounds more like the start of a horror flick than a quarterly update from a CIO’s office.

The result was that many key patent and trademark systems — like those that allow people to file and search for applications — were unavailable for nearly a week. The agency’s IT staff and vendors came in over the Christmas holiday to make fixes and restore service...

...[Tony Cole, vice president and global government CTO at FireEye] said the biggest lesson he hopes the government learns is that it needs to upgrade its IT infrastructure. He touted U.S. CIO Tony Scott's push to create a $3.1 billion IT Modernization Fund, a proposal that he has been trying to sell to Congress. And he also recommended that the government make a stronger push into the cloud."

Juno probe enters Jupiter's orbit after 'amazing' Nasa mission – as it happened; Guardian, 7/5/16

Michael Slezak, Guardian; Juno probe enters Jupiter's orbit after 'amazing' Nasa mission – as it happened:

"Well, what a day. What an achievement.

After a five year journey from Earth, Juno the solar-powered spacecraft squeezed through a narrow band, skimming Jupiter’s surface, avoiding the worst of both its radiation belt and its dangerous dust rings.

It fired its main engine, slowing its velocity, and allowing it to get captured into Jupiter’s hefty orbit.

After it was complete, jubilant scientists fronted a press conference, and tore up a “contingency communication strategy” they said they prepared in case things went wrong.

“To know we can go to bed tonight not worrying about what is going to happen tomorrow, is just amazing,” said Diane Brown, a project manager from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Scott Bolton, principle investigator of the Juno mission told his colleagues: “You’re the best team ever! We just did the hardest thing Nasa has ever done.”"