When conducting missions, balancing performance, risk, cost and schedule is a constant challenge.

As the space landscape changes, NASA and its partners in the space and aerospace sectors are challenged with pursuing faster, more agile mission developments with fewer resources and directed schedules. To meet this demand, mission development teams are faced with accepting more risk and trading performance within strict cost and schedule constraints.

In responding to this challenge, Vicky Hwa, former senior technical lead in the Office of Safety and Mission Assurance supporting the Space Technology Mission Directorate, and her team at NASA partnered with The Aerospace Corporation to develop the Adaptive Mission Assurance (AMA) approach with the goal of easing the burden of mission constraints.

AMA is a framework that enables NASA teams to optimize Safety and Mission Assurance (SMA) tasks for risk tolerant, constraints-driven missions, including Class D and Sub-class D missions. High risk tolerant, constraints-driven missions that are often constrained by smaller budgets and directed schedules, benefit most from AMA as development teams must choose the most valuable subset of SMA tasks that will fit within their prescribed constraints.

“It’s very different from the traditional top-down approach that is used in SMA,” said Hwa. “We are now talking about a bottom-up approach.”

In requirements-driven missions, performance and risk requirements drive cost and schedule. Cost and schedule are adjusted for achieving the lowest possible risk while delivering specified performance requirements. In constraint-driven missions, cost and schedule constraints drive performance and risk. Performance and risk are adjusted to meet cost and schedule requirements while still achieving mission objectives.

AMA responds to these challenges with little or no impact to team staffing or existing workload by accepting the necessary risk to meet cost and schedule constraints to achieve mission success. It provides a value driven approach for selecting the highest value SMA tasks that fit within cost and schedule constraints.

“Rather than taking requirements off the table, we start with a minimum set of mandatory requirements,” said Hwa. “These types of projects are very strict when it comes to cost and schedule. Since we do not have the luxury of trying to remove requirements as the project progresses, we ‘adapt’ requirements to the project along the way.”

AMA utilizes agile principles and tools, as well as mandatory safety and Do No Harm requirements. It then boosts the most valuable mission assurance activities before hitting cost and schedule constraints.

“The team can then decide if the resulting risk picture is acceptable,” said Hwa. “The approach is then agilely adjusted for emergent risks and issues that are typical for these types of innovative missions. This is done by adaptively maintaining the most valuable mission assurance activities while updating the resulting risk picture and staying within cost and schedule constraints.”

As Hwa and her team move into the second phase of the project, their sights are set on the aerospace community. The team aims to start a pilot program and seeks potential aerospace partners to utilize the AMA approach for their missions.

“That will allow us to identify what works and what doesn’t so we can make modifications and improvements to the approach,” said Hwa.

Hwa also envisions developing AMA training that is geared towards an SMA audience.

“We will work on taking this material and developing it into a training course,” said Hwa. “We want to make this project real and tangible.”

To learn more about AMA, view the whitepaper, “Adaptive Mission Assurance (AMA) – A Conceptual Guide for NASA Missions” and the presentation, “Adaptive Mission Assurance (AMA) for NASA High Risk Tolerant, Constraints-driven Missions."