THE ROSETTA SPACECRAFT: VERIFICATION APPROACH, TESTING AND RELATED ANALYSIS WITH MAT€D TOOL

摘要

The ROSETTA mission was approved as a cornerstone mission within ESA’s Horizon 2000 science program. Originally the selected target was a periodic comet known as P/Wirtanen, to be reached in 2011. In January 2003, the date of the launch, ESA had to reassess the situation and to postpone the launch, due to difficulties with the Ariane 5 program. Comet Churyumov/Gerasimenko was selected as the new target, with a new launch date in February 2004. This paper describes in detail the verification approach needed to merge thorough testing with the necessity to complete every activity in time to cope with a fixed launch date, which resulted in a full testing program carried out on a Structural Model (thermal/mechanical aspects), an Engineering Qualification Model (electrical, functional, autonomy, and mission simulation aspects, still operational after launch), and the Protoflight Model, which has undergone a full acceptance test program. Analyses and statistics on the anomalies recorded during the whole project will also be presented, making use of MAT€D, a dedicated tool developed by Alenia with ESA to analyze ground and flight anomalies for various spacecraft.