PRELIMINARY RESULTS FROM THE ANALYSIS ON THE MARS EXPRESS ASSEMBLY INTEGRATION AND VERIFICATION (AIV) ACTIVITIES

摘要

The Mars Express mission is one of the most advanced planned to be carried out in Europe. Plus it has been named a FLEXI-mission. This means a shorter development time, a tighter budget, a different industrial approach and, more significant for us all, a different model and test philosophy. The paper will describe in broad details the mission and the spacecraft, as well as key points of the model philosophy and the verification process. The work then moves on to give some results obtained from the analysis carried out using the well known, and now fully operational, MATED tool. The data was collected throughout the integration, testing and launch campaign. A first for this type of activity is that the data was almost collected real time. The lessons learned from this challenging program will be used extensively to smooth out the process on the following planet missions of the same type, such as the Venus Express, which is briefly introduced at the end.