The Government-Industry Data Exchange Program’s “Know Your Part” campaign promotes this valuable tool to NASA engineers and procurement professionals to ensure that we use the best parts on our spacecraft and technology.

Following several months of collaboration, the NASA Safety and Mission Assurance (SMA) roadmap planning and risk classification document NPR 8705.4B Risk Classification for NASA Payloads is being formally released to the agency. This revision, which replaces NPR 8705.4A, provides center, program and project SMA activity planners (including Reliability) with a one-stop authoritative SMA planning source. 

The NASA Electronic Parts and Packaging Program is bridging gaps between engineering and assurance disciplines using a Model-Based Mission Assurance tool built around NASA-STD-8729.1, NASA Reliability and Maintainability (R&M) Standard for Spaceflight and Support Systems. The tool — the Systems Engineering and Assurance Modeling platform — is a web-based collaborative platform for modeling assurance cases that can be integrated with the models of the system. 

A new public-private initiative is working to improve Small Satellite (SmallSat) mission confidence. Historically, using CubeSats or SmallSats for certain types of missions have largely been viewed as unviable due to the mission success rate associated with these missions. As the space industry landscape changes — continuous technological advancements; miniaturization of Electrical, Electronic, and Electromechanical Parts and components; and increasing constraints on budget and schedule — both the public and private sector are looking to the small spacecraft platform for a range of missions with expectations of mission success.

“At NASA, we should allow computers to do what computers are good at, so people can do what people are good at.”

This perspective, explained by MBSE Pathfinder Study Co-Lead Jessica Knizhnik, is the main motive behind a Pathfinder study, sponsored by the NASA Engineering and Safety Center, to investigate how Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) and Model-Based Engineering (MBE) techniques can be applied by NASA projects. 

Multi-disciplinary physics-of-failure testing and simulations conducted on Printed Circuit Boards at Goddard Space Flight Center recently resulted in an industry standard update, which will lead to cost savings not only for NASA but for the electronics industry in general.

One of the most important aspects of Reliability and Maintainability is understanding how things fail. Engineers can only make systems reliable if they understand what makes them unreliable.

Johnson Space Center’s Reliability and Maintainability program is working on a new system that helps engineers and mission managers make better risk-informed decisions.