Predicting mission success in small satellite missions

In our global society with its increasing international competition and tighter financial resources, governments, commercial entities and other organizations are becoming critically aware of the need to ensure that space missions can be achieved on time and within budgets. This has become particularly true for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Office of Space Science (OSS) which has developed their Discovery and Explorer programs to meet this need. As technologies advance, space missions are becoming smaller and more capable than their predecessors. The ability to predict the mission success of these small satellite missions is critical to the continued achievement of NASA science mission objectives. The NASA OSS, in cooperation with the NASA Langley Research Center, has implemented a process to predict the likely success of missions proposed to its Discovery and Explorer programs. This process is becoming the basis for predicting mission success in many other NASA programs as well. This paper describes the process, methodology, tools and synthesis techniques used to predict mission success of this class of mission.