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.

Not much is known about the Kappa Cygnid meteor shower, and NASA’s Meteoroid Environments Office (MEO) is working to rectify that.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office granted NASA’s Office of Safety and Mission Assurance Nondestructive Evaluation (NDE) program a patent for its Electric Field Quantitative Measurement System and Method. The patent covers both the Electric Field Imaging sensor and the methods developed by Edward Generazio, NDE program manager.

NASA’s Office of Safety and Mission Assurance Nondestructive Evaluation (NDE) program recently published a Technical Manual, NASA DOEPOD [Design of Experiments for Probability of Detection] NDE Capabilities Data Book.