Mission Operations Assurance (MOA) started at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) with the Magellan and Galileo missions of the late 80's. It continued to develop and received a significant impetus with the failures of two successive missions to Mars in the late 90's. MOA continued to evolve with each successive project at JPL achieving its current maturity with the Stardust sample return to Earth. The role of mission operations assurance during the sample return phase of the Stardust mission was to provide independent risk assessments to the Project Manager and to the Office of Safety and Mission Success (OSMS) at JPL and the NASA Headquarters counterparts. The mission operations assurance effort also included a review of JPL Flight Project Practices and Design Principles for residual risks as well as applicability to mission operations, the development of an incompressible test list specific to the sample return operations, and the review of safety and mission success considerations as a result of the Genesis Project lessons learned. Additionally, the mission operations assurance manager would provide invaluable insight to the Project regarding evolving institutional requirements and expectations in preparation for the Sample Return Capsule (SRC) return and recovery.The discussion below describes the participation of the Stardust mission operations assurance manager in the preparation effort for the SRC return. In general the mission operations assurance effort was conducted in parallel to the detailed preparation by the flight team, providing the independent perspective to project and institutional management. The results achieved provide the basis for the continued growth of the MOA discipline at JPL and throughout the Space Operations Community. I. Historical BackgroundWhen the Challenger exploded in 1986, one of the immediate results at JPL was the delay in the launch of the Galileo spacecraft to Jupiter. The ensuing accident investigation made it abundantly clear that there were residual risks from development activities that could affect flight operations. Consequently, JPL made the decision to extend the normal Mission Assurance function into flight operations to independently identify and assess residual development risks as well as perform an ongoing assessment of risk throughout the operational mission. Thus as Magellan (which was now scheduled to launch on the shuttle ahead of Galileo) and Galileo prepared for their interplanetary launches from the space shuttle, the concept of Mission Operations Assurance was born at JPL.
Space flight missions are inherently risky. The mission operations assurance discipline grew out of strategies to control error and evolved into what today is an independent technical authority dedicated to achieving mission success. After the Mars Climate Orbiter loss, NASA made a set of recommendations for missions. Two of those recommendations led to the creation of today's Mission Operations Assurance Manager role: (1) require an independent Mission Assurance representative during the operational phase of every flight project, and (2) require all flight projects to report and track post-launch anomalies. Since then, the MOAM role has been continually refined by lessons learned from its practice on more than 20 concurrent missions. The MOAM role requires significant operations experience as well as an additional set of skills. In the interests of developing a cadre of potential MOAMs, the MOAM training program was developed. It is a 14-unit set of presentations/discussions covering the 11 categories of MOAM tasks. It is offered to new MOAMs and interested systems engineers with an eye to preparing both types of personnel for present and future assignments, as well as building relationships among personnel of different organizations. MOAM training sessions include presentations on the various tools and processes employed by MOAMs, interspersed with mindset lessons illustrated via "war story" discussions of previous missions.
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