Space Traffic Control Mission Assurance

NASA has begun charting a new future, which includes a journey that will take humans back to the Moon, and eventually to Mars and beyond. This new vision for space exploration calls for a "building block" strategy of human and robotic missions to achieve new exploration goals. Robotic missions to the Moon are to begin no later than 2008, followed by human expeditions as early as 2015. This type of accelerated space exploration will require a Space Traffic Control (STC) system to supply guidance to spacecraft, to prevent collisions and efficiently manage space orbital traffic flow. The STC system will need to interface with existing terrestrial Air Traffic Control (ATC) systems and at the same time incorporate Network Centric principles to support operations for a solar wide System of System (SOS) concept. STC Mission Assurance (MA) quantifies the systems ability to reduce operational risk to an acceptable level by the disciplined application of SOS engineering analysis of the STC mission, architecture, design, performance, environment and operations. The acceptable level of operational risk focuses on those mission and safety critical functions whose failure (or degradation) would directly affect system/personnel safety, mission success, and the efficiency of STC operations. The operational risk incorporates the sequence of all value-added activities performed to complete the STC mission, establishing criteria for measuring operational risk and defining the tolerance for operational risk. The Raytheon SOS concept will integrate STC operational goals, existing system capabilities and existing NASA (industry) standards. This will result in a strategic implementation roadmap, which establishes a functional baseline for achieving optimized mission effectiveness through the four mission phases of launch, orbit, en-route and landing. The SOS elements for the STC system are tightly coupled with the incorporation of space travel technological innovations. This paper addresses how the principles of MA support the SOS development of the technologies required for the implementation of a STC system. To incorporate these technological innovations, the STC system MA principles and standards address: 1) Availability Availability is the degree to which the STC system will result in a successful mission. The availability of the STC system influences the impact of emerging technological innovations which control and monitor space traffic. 2) Accuracy Accuracy is the degree of conformity of a detected or predicted position in space to its actual position. Enhancing STC system efficiency and productivity will increase the accuracy of collision avoidance performance bounding for both spacecraft/spacecraft and spacecraft/debris collisions. 3) Integrity Integrity is the correctness and reliability of the STC system. STC integrity issues are associated with the evolutionary transition processes for operations and procedures of tracking and prediction of space debris and space weather. 4) Continuity Continuity combines STC availability, accuracy and integrity to define the level of risk for STC mission assurance. It defines the STC route authority environment that directly influences global planning methodology, systems and facilities.