Tiger team

A tiger team is a group of experts assigned to investigate and/or solve technical or systemic problems. A 1964 paper defined the term as "a team of undomesticated and uninhibited technical specialists, selected for their experience, energy, and imagination, and assigned to track down relentlessly every possible source of failure in a spacecraft subsystem."^[1]

Security

In security work, a tiger team is a specialized group that tests an organization's ability to protect its assets by attempting to circumvent, defeat, or otherwise thwart that organization's internal and external security.

Examples

• The NSA Cyber Defense Tiger Team (Red Cell) is a tiger team that was created by the National Security Agency^[2]
• Tiger Team, BAE Systems, Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. International Fast Response Ship Repair team
• The NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC), when requested by a project or program, puts together "tiger teams" of engineers and scientists from multiple NASA centers to assist solving a difficult or complex problem.^[3]
• Many tiger teams are informally constituted through managerial edicts.

One of these was set up in NASA circa 1966 to solve the "Apollo Navigation Problem". The motivation was the discovery that current technology was unable to navigate Apollo at the level of precision mandated by the mission planners. Tests using radio tracking data from unmanned Lunar Orbiter spacecraft to evaluate circumlunar Apollo navigation were revealing errors of 2000 meters instead of the 200 that the mission required to safely land Apollo when descending from its lunar orbit.

For example, Apollo astronauts were practicing landings in safe areas using the simulators at Houston. A tenfold increase in this error-bound implied a hundredfold increase in the target area, which then included unacceptably dangerous terrain. The mission was seriously at risk.

Five tiger teams were set up to find and correct the problem, one at each NASA center, from Caltech JPL in the west to Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in the east. The Russians via Luna 10 were also well aware of this problem.

There was an intentionally competitive aspect to this strategy, which was "won" by JPL in the spring of 1968 when it was shown that the problem was caused by the unexpectedly large local gravity anomalies on the Moon arising from large ringed maria, mountain ranges and craters. This also led to the construction of the first detailed gravimetric map of a body other than the Earth and the discovery of the lunar mass concentrations (Mascons).^[4]

See also

• Red team
• Penetration test
• Red Cell US Navy SEAL Tiger Team
• Sneakers (1992)
• Tiger Team television show on Court TV (TruTV)
• Tiger kidnappings, performed by criminal squads called tiger teams

References

1. J. R. Dempsey, W. A. Davis, A. S. Crossfield, and Walter C. Williams, "Program Management in Design and Development," in Third Annual Aerospace Reliability and Maintainability Conference, Society of Automotive Engineers, 1964, p. 7–8.
2. "Cyber Defense Exercise 2008 - NSA Video Transcripts - NSA/CSS". Nsa.gov. 2009-01-15. Retrieved 2012-01-08.
3. "Benefits of a One NASA Organization in Solving Program and Project Technical Issues". Lessons Learned. NASA. 2004-05-07. Retrieved 6 November 2015.
4. Paul Muller and William Sjogren (1968). "Mascons: lunar mass concentrations". Science 161 (3842): 680–684. doi:10.1126/science.161.3842.680. PMID 17801458

External links

• All About Tiger Team

This article is based on material taken from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing prior to 1 November 2008 and incorporated under the "relicensing" terms of the GFDL, version 1.3 or later.