Abstract

For the past ten years the Photonics Group at NASA GSFC has been supporting flight projects with design, development, manufacturing, qualification, integration and failure analysis of optical fiber components. The majority of systems over the past decade have been comprised of commercial components on projects that have short schedules and small budgets. So under these circumstances, the primary challenge for building flight hardware systems becomes assuring the reliability of such a system in the flight environment. In many cases it’s impossible to be absolutely sure your system will function without failure when its assembled with commercial photonic components. So the exercise of reliability becomes more like an endeavor to reduce risk through design and testing of less than adequate sample sizes. The methods by which you would normally “qualify” your system become more as a requirements validation because of limited resources and quick delivery schedules. As a result of this dilemma, an engineer has to be very knowledgeable about the physics of failure on the particular components that will be used to assemble a system. The requirements validation testing or “qualification” testing is a method by which you test for those failure modes to achieve an acceptable risk reduction. In addition to knowing which tests are the most effective at providing requirements validation, the method by which the test is conducted is just as important.

© 2007 Optical Society of America