As the agency looks at opportunities to use CubeSats in science and exploration missions, NASA’s Safety and Mission Assurance (SMA) community is working to address some of the SMA challenges associated with these small spacecraft.

The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, with the support of NASA’s Meteoroids Environments Office, conducted a dust study as a part of NASA’s Solar Probe Plus mission to explore the sun’s outer atmosphere. 

A team at NASA Johnson Space Flight Center is working to improve Reliability and Maintainability for the Cascade Distillation System using Model-Based Systems Engineering techniques.

NASA’s Technology Evaluation for Environmental Risk Mitigation Program Office, part of the Environmental Management Division, works with agency programs and projects to enhance mission readiness and reduce risks caused by environmental pressures.

The Europa Clipper is the first mission to integrate into its design a new Software Assurance process on managing Command File Errors.

The Oxygen Compatibility Assessment (OCA) team at NASA’s White Sands Test Facility created a Web-based OCA database that will be available agency-wide within the next year.  

The NASA Metrology and Calibration program’s Programmable Josephson Voltage Standard (PJVS) recently was routed to three other government organizations as part of an Inter-Laboratory Comparison (ILC). The PJVS is the most accurate Direct Current (DC) voltage calibration standard available.  The comparison validated that NASA’s PJVS and the Josephson voltage standards at those locations are working properly and providing accurate measurements.

Although Additive Manufacturing (AM) has been around for decades, increasing awareness of the significant benefits of flying 3D printed parts and using 3D printers in space has pushed NASA and the aerospace industry to take a close look at how to evaluate and certify AM parts to assure safety and mission success. 

Goddard Space Flight Center developed Mission Configuration and the Failure Interrogation and Archiving Tool to improve reliability predictions for missions.

NASA programs are exploring risk-based approaches that reduce cost without increasing risk for safety-critical attributes as a replacement for Government Mandatory Inspection Points (GMIPs). Quality Assurance and risk management officers from NASA programs and industry gathered at ATK in Promontory, Utah, on Oct. 22-23 to share their ideas and methods.