Evaluation of spacecraft product assurance requirements and flight performance history

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has undertaken a task to relate long-duration space flight hardware performance to specific product assurance requirements established during the hardware development process. The approach that JPL is using to correlate in-flight and ground test hardware failures to critical product assurance practices implemented on a given flight project is described. The first step in this effort has been to collect, and convert into a convenient format, in-flight problem, failure, and anomaly data. A characterization of a subset of this anomaly database, focusing on anomaly causes, time dependence, and subsystem affected is presented. Preliminary results from an analysis of the data set are presented