Principles for Developing Interplanetary Spacecraft Fault Management Systems

Abstract

While fault management has long been a critical component of the system engineering process to reduce mission risk, there has also been an absence of clear and concise principles to direct this process. A fault management process, first used on the NASA Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) mission, for developing interplanetary fault management systems is presented to address this concern. A set of fault management design principles (mission design, critical scenarios, redundancy philosophy, and safing strategy) is presented with supporting examples from three deep-space NASA missions. These key principles are the driving force behind the fault management design and are integrated together through a process that follows the product lifecycle from concept development through integration and test. The result is clear and concise fault management principles that can be applied to interplanetary missions.