Fault management (FM) in human spaceflight programs such as the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station is a function of the system designs, operational techniques, and programmatic constraints. Pre‐flight and in‐flight processes along with products used to anticipate, mitigate, and respond to failures all affect fault management. Vehicle complexity, flexibility, and operational margin largely drive the operational resources required to develop and sustain a human‐rated spacecraft flight capability. Although the tools and formats have changed over the years, the basic practices and processes supporting mission operations remain much the same as they were decades ago. These system engineering and integration processes apply equally to the wide array of vehicles and missions NASA has flown since the early years of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo (Kranz and Kraft, 1990).

    The architecture of a command and control system impacts operations in areas such as the required failure response times, automated vs. manual failure responses, and the use of workarounds. The architecture includes the use of redundancy at the system and software function level, software capabilities, and the use of intelligent or autonomous systems. This in turn drives which caution and warning (C&W) events should be annunciated, C&W event classification, operator display designs, crew training, flight control team training, and procedure development. Other factors impacting operations are the complexity of a system, skills needed to understand and operate a system, and the use of commonality vs. optimized solutions for software and responses.

    Failure detection, annunciation, safing responses, and recovery capabilities directly impact operations. The crew and flight control team need to understand what happened, why it happened, what the system is doing, and what, if any, corrective actions they need to perform. If a failure results in multiple C&W events, or if several faults and/or failures occur simultaneously, the root cause(s) of the failure(s), as well as their vehicle‐wide impacts, must be determined in order to maintain situational awareness. This allows both automated and manual recovery operations to focus on the real cause of the failure(s). An appropriate balance must be struck between correcting the failure(s) resulting from the root cause (fault or environmental cause) and addressing the impacts of that root cause on other vehicle components.

    Many fault management processes in the Space Shuttle and International Space Station are candidates for improvement and automation. Operational experience provides insight into possible improvements in software, displays, and procedures which may be candidates for automation. Enabling technologies and techniques are identified that could facilitate the evolution from manual failure responses to automated failure response and recovery where they are most effective. These considerations include the value in correcting software defects in a timely manner, automation of repetitive tasks, and making time‐critical responses autonomous.


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    Title :

    Fault Management Techniques in Human Spaceflight Operations



    Published in:

    Publication date :

    2011-07-15


    Size :

    17 pages




    Type of media :

    Article/Chapter (Book)


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English




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