The Perseid meteor shower, which peaks in August of each year, was twice as active in 2016 compared to other years. The Perseids are always a major shower and move at very high speeds, so monitoring is essential for the safety of NASA’s spacecraft as there is great potential for high-energy impacts. Increases in activity, like that seen this year, add additional mission risks.

Imagine if capturing an X-ray was as fast and simple as taking a digital photo. Now imagine being able to capture high-speed radiography videos with the same relative ease. 

Want to search for NASA Advisories, Government-Industry Data Exchange Program (GIDEP) Notices and other similar documents on your own?

Up until now, if you wanted to search GIDEP, you either needed your own account or had to contact your center GIDEP representative. Now, if you are within the NASA firewall, you can search for GIDEP Notices and NASA Advisories yourself. 

These days 3-D printing is a fairly well-known concept, but in the design and Quality Assurance worlds, 3-D printing — aka Additive Manufacturing (AM) — is still in its infancy. There aren’t many policies guiding AM efforts at NASA, other government organizations or in industry, but the AM community is working hard to change that.

NASA’s Office of Safety and Mission Assurance’s Nondestructive Evaluation program is leading a variety of agency initiatives to ensure the successful qualification of Additive Manufacturing products for deployment on future NASA missions.

Over the last seven years, Goddard Space Flight Center has experienced a massive increase in the use of inherited components, including flight-printed wiring assemblies.

An inherited component is one that either already exists or is built-to-print from an existing design. If these parts aren’t designed, manufactured, inspected, tested and delivered acceptably, they pose an elevated risk to missions.

The July 2016 edition of Orbital Debris Quarterly News included an article on Micrometeoroid and Orbital Debris impacts on an International Space Station cover. Continue reading for the full article. 

NASA’s Orbital Debris Program Office is acquiring a Titan Transtage from the Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group , commonly known as “The Boneyard,” at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona, to conduct spectrographic inspections to better understand these historic spacecraft.

On Feb. 17-18, Goddard Space Flight Center hosted its second Model-Based Engineering (MBE) workshop, which included an overview of MBE’s mission assurance counterpart, Model-Based Mission Assurance.