STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF A LARGE SAMPLE SIZE PYROSHOCK TEST DATA SET INCLUDING POST FLIGHT DATA ASSESSMENT

摘要

The EOS Terra spacecraft launched on an Atlas IIAS launch vehicle on its mission to observe planet Earth in late 1999. Prior to launch, the new design of the spacecraft's pyroshock separation system was characterized by a series of thirteen separation ground tests. The analysis methods used to evaluate this unusually large amount of shock data will be discussed in this paper, with particular emphasis on population distributions and finding statistically significant families of data, leading to an overall shock separation interface level. The wealth of ground test data also allowed a derivation of a Mission Assurance level for the flight. All of the flight shock measurements were below the EOS Terra Mission Assurance level thus contributing to the overall success of the EOS Terra mission. The effectiveness of the statistical methodology for characterizing the shock interface level and for developing a flight Mission Assurance level from a large sample size of shock data is demonstrated in this paper.