NASA’s new Microbial Forward Contamination Evaluation (M‑FORCE) Tiger Team recently met at the NASA Safety Center in Cleveland, Ohio, to produce a comprehensive assessment of planetary protection’s forward contamination requirements on Mars.

NASA’s Office of Safety and Mission Assurance, in coordination with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has prepared a new Quick‑Start Guide to support mission teams pursuing Mars Category IVa landing missions.

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) recently published ISO 9001:2026 Quality Management Systems — Requirements.  This update replaces ISO 9001:2015, last revised in 2024.

Members of NASA's Safety and Mission Assurance (SMA) community are sharing their expertise and innovative approaches to software safety, mission assurance, Supply Chain Risk Management (SCRM), commercial spaceflight and Technical Authority at the 14th International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety (IAASS) Conference in Antibes, France, Oct. 20-22.

The Office of Safety and Mission Assurance (OSMA) recently revised NPR 8715.26A, Nuclear Flight Safety. The NASA Procedural Requirement (NPR) defines the roles and responsibilities for managing and overseeing NASA’s Nuclear Flight Safety (NFS) activities. 

NASA’s Office of Safety and Mission Assurance (OSMA), in partnership with the Science Mission Directorate (SMD), is seeking applicants for a newly established external Tiger Team named Mars Forward Operational Risk and Contamination Evaluation (M‑FORCE). 

The High Performance Spaceflight Computing (HPSC) processor is the next-generation space-based microprocessor for future space missions. The HPSC has superior computational capacity and multicore architecture to provide unprecedented flexibility, power management and fault tolerance.

Quality professionals across NASA can benefit from the agency-wide organizational membership in the American Society for Quality (ASQ). The membership provides employees access to quality resources, professional development opportunities, benchmarking tools, member pricing and connections to the broader quality community.

Nathan Vassberg, NASA’s acting chief of Safety and Mission Assurance (SMA), recently presented Ivan Chavez, structural engineer at Armstrong Flight Research Center, with a “Yes, If” coin in recognition of his commitment to mission success and safety, initiative, and creativity during the X-59 flight test program.

The NASA Contractor Report: Fitness-For-Service Assessments of Crack-Like Flaws Using NASGRO® (STRIVES Document ID 20250011200) has been approved and published on the NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS).