Assessment of Environmental Test Programs for Successful Spacecraft Projects

This paper presents an assessment of the environmental test programs conducted on NASDA's spacecraft. Recently, cost reduction of spacecraft development has been widely required. Therefore, a brush-up of the current environmental tests is one of the items to be considered. In order to improve the test and verification methods of spacecraft from the economical point of view, it is a prerequisite to evaluate the effectiveness of the current environmental tests. In this paper, we will first introduce the background to this problem, and attempt to develop a conceptual model to systematically analyze the failure data accumulated through spacecraft development and flight operation in orbit. Then, we will discuss the fundamental features of the ground test and orbit data using the model as a guide for data analysis, and will further present the failure screening characteristics of the acceptance test (AT) and protofiight test (PFT) programs with their evaluated test strength and effectiveness.