Systems Engineering Seminar

System Engineering Considerations for Planning Instrument/Observatory Level Thermal Vacuum Tests

Presented by:
Carol Mosier, Senior Thermal Systems Engineer, Code 545

Biography:

System Engineering Considerations for Planning Instrument/Observatory Level Thermal Vacuum Tests

Ms. Mosier is senior thermal systems engineer with the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Working primarily on in-house projects during her 29 years at NASA, Ms. Mosier has been instrumental in the planning and execution of over 25 instrument/observatory level thermal tests. Ms. Mosier is currently assigned as the thermal systems engineer on the TIRS instrument for the LDCM mission that is scheduled to launch in 2013. During her career at Goddard she has worked on many challenging projects including COBE, UARS, XRS, GRS, SHOOT, CIRS, WIRE, TRACE, SMEX-lite, SIRTF, JWST, ULDB, LISA, WMAP, XRS, ST-5, SAM, and TIRS. This has afforded a wide-range of testing experience from cryogenics to high-temperature systems in addition to the standard spacecraft testing. Ms. Mosier has been an instructor for spacecraft engineering design course at the University of Maryland. She also developed and teaches a thermal design course at NASA for civil servants and support contractors. Ms. Mosier is currently working with the NASA Engineering and Safety Center's (NESC) to develop standard training materials for thermal testing and thermal design/analysis.

Abstract:

Thermal vacuum testing is the most complex and expensive of the environmental test campaign. The Instrument/Observatory Level Test is the ultimate verification of the Engineering/Science requirements over the flight environmental range. Early planning is essential to ensure that all mission, project, and NASA Goddard requirements are met. Detailed planning requires the coordination of subsystem, software, science, and facility personnel to have a successful test program and guarantee the safety of the hardware. This presentation will provide an overview of the systems planning process, potential effects on flight design/verification, basic thermal test elements and test profile development. Real life examples from Goddard missions are used to illustrate key points.