The ability to detect, diagnose, and respond to faults and anomalies in a timely fashion is a major concern in space missions. Fault Management (FM) primarily concerns operational mitigations of spacecraft failures. Qualtech Systems worked towards development of software tools for facilitating FM by using TEAMS (Testability Engineering and Maintenance System) as the underlying platform. The software tools will aid in satisfying a large subset of FM objectives: Determining completeness and appropriateness of FM designs and implementations; decreasing the labor and time required to develop and test FM models and algorithms; improving visualization of FM designs and analytic results; aiding testing and V&V (verification and validation) of FM designs and determining residual risk resulting from incomplete coverage; and increasing reliability of FM systems are major areas of focus.

The goal of this work was to implement the design and analysis-related FM goals through software tool support via the following steps:

  1. Identification of FM capability requirements (or desired capabilities).
  2. Verification of the requirements through discussions with NASA personnel involved in FM.
  3. Rank ordering the desired capabilities, and selection of the top few for Phase II development.
  4. Identify preliminary strategies to incorporate the capabilities in TEAMS toolset.

Once the selected capabilities are incorporated in TEAMS toolset, they enhance the modeling capabilities and leverage the built-in diagnostic, analytic, and model validation for realizing the FM goals.

This work was done by Mohammad Azam, Sudipto Ghoshal, and Deepak Haste of Qualtech Systems Inc. for Marshall Space Flight Center. For more information, contact Sammy Nabors, MSFC Commercialization Assistance Lead, at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Refer to MFS-32999-1.