[MaRS Project]

Abstract

The Space Exploration Division of the Safety and Mission Assurances Directorate is responsible for reducing the risk to Human Space Flight Programs by providing system safety, reliability, and risk analysis. The Risk & Reliability Analysis branch plays a part in this by utilizing Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) and Reliability and Maintainability (R&M) tools to identify possible types of failure and effective solutions. A continuous effort of this branch is MaRS, or Mass and Reliability System, a tool that was the focus of this internship. Future long duration space missions will have to find a balance between the mass and reliability of their spare parts. They will be unable take spares of everything and will have to determine what is most likely to require maintenance and spares. Currently there is no database that combines mass and reliability data of low level space-grade components. MaRS aims to be the first database to do this. The data in MaRS will be based on the hardware flown on the International Space Stations (ISS). The components on the ISS have a long history and are well documented, making them the perfect source. Currently, MaRS is a functioning excel workbook database; the backend is complete and only requires optimization. MaRS has been populated with all the assemblies and their components that are used on the ISS; the failures of these components are updated regularly. This project was a continuation on the efforts of previous intern groups. Once complete, R&M engineers working on future space flight missions will be able to quickly access failure and mass data on assemblies and components, allowing them to make important decisions and tradeoffs.