Engineering Risk Assessment

When designing new aerospace vehicles or exploration systems, a thorough understanding of potential failures and the resulting risks is critical to making missions as safe and successful as possible. The ERA team’s assessments of new system designs, mission criteria, and failure scenarios support a variety of NASA mission areas.

Launch Risk Modeling and Simulation

State-of-the-art risk modeling and simulations of vehicle failure environments provide valuable input for assessing and improving launch safety for NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS), Commercial Crew Program, and commercial launch partners. Probabilisitic models of failure propagation and abort risks help evaluate overall design safety and identify risk-driving failure mechanisms, while high-fidelity simulations provide a better understanding of the complex physics of flame propagation, debris strikes, overpressures, and other phenomena that could occur following a possible catastrophic event during launch.

Mars Sample Return

The team’s probabilistic risk assessments and simulations support science missions such as NASA’s Mars Sample Return (MSR), which proposes to bring samples of Martian rocks and soil back to Earth for in-depth study. Probabilistic risk assessments of the MSR Earth Entry Vehicle (EEV) help to ensure that the samples can be landed safely Earth while maintaining reliable containment. To provide EEV engineers with key data for evaluating and comparing thermal protection system (TPS) materials, the team also runs high-fidelity simulations of TPS damage resulting from hypervelocity micrometeoroid impacts that could occur in space.

Lunar Campaign

To help proactively prepare risk assessments capabilities for long-duration, multi-launch missions to the Moon, the ERA team developed a prototype dynamic probabilistic risk model, the Mission Architecture Risk Assessment (MARA), which could be used to support risk-informed design for long-term lunar campaigns, such as the Artemis Program.

Urban Air Mobility

The team’s probabilistic risk models have supported the design and evaluation of uncrewed aerial systems being developed for possible use in urban areas.