New Reliability Configuration for Large Planetary Descent Vehicles

摘要

This Note has addressed a new reliability configuration problem that may be needed in large future powered vehicle descent and pos- sibly ascent design processes. Whereas Eqs. (3) and (5) are general for any parent PDF, it is not easy to derive closed-form reliability expressions for certain PDFs such as the normal and the general gamma distributions. Then, Monte Carlo simulation can be used in such cases. The specific formulas presented, however, can be used if exponential and uniform distributions are good representations for engine lives in a given problem.