Increasing the Use of COTS in Classic Space Missions

ABSTRACT

The advent of the New Space initiative has challenged one of the most established paradigms of space activity: the use of electronic components that have not been designed, built, and tested for that application guarantees early mission failure. The extensive and successful use of such components by the missions of this initiative is due to three factors: the existence of missions that can be accomplished in short periods of time, the amortization of the high costs of screening processes thanks to the economy of scale associated with missions involving constellations of a large number of satellites, and the possibility of ensuring mission success through redundancy at the satellite rather than component level, given the resulting low cost of the satellites.

Traditional missions that must be carried out by a single satellite and must survive the aggressive conditions of space for long periods are at a disadvantage when trying to compete on cost per satellite with these types of components. Strategies such as crowd testing partially mitigate these limitations but still fall short of the short production times and low costs that large-scale satellite production processes allow. However, it is possible to think of a methodology based on the combination of prevention/mitigation engineering with component testing in a risk management context that allows progressively optimizing times and costs, even if we are talking about the traditional mission paradigm. This work presents a possible methodology that would present these characteristics.

Speaker: Roberto Manuel Cibils – INVAP –

He currently works at the Engineering and Production Division of INVAP. Roberto researches Aerospace and Nuclear Reactors Systems Engineering, Risk Assessment of Electronic Systems for Avionic and Nuclear Safety Systems Health Management. His most recent projects are “Lifetime extension of electronic systems” and “Ageing management of SSC in Nuclear Research Reactors safety systems.”