Mission Assurance is a full life-cycle engineering process to identify and mitigate design, production, test, and field support deficiencies threatening mission success.

Aspects of Mission Assurance

Mission Assurance includes the disciplined application of

system engineering Systems engineering is an interdisciplinary field of engineering and engineering management that focuses on how to design, integrate, and manage complex systems over their life cycles. At its core, systems engineering utilizes systems thinking ...

, risk management, quality, and management principles to achieve success of a design, development, testing, deployment, and operations process. Mission Assurance's ideal is achieving 100% customer success every time. Mission Assurance reaches across the enterprise, supply base,

business partner A business partner is a commercial entity with which another commercial entity has some form of alliance. This relationship may be a contractual, exclusive bond in which both entities commit not to ally with third parties. Alternatively, it may be ...

s, and

customer base The customer base is a group of customers who repeatedly purchase the goods or services of a business. These customers are a main source of revenue for a company. The customer base may be considered a business's target market, where customer beha ...

to enable customer success. The ultimate goal of Mission Assurance is to create a state of resilience that supports the continuation of an agency's critical

business process A business process, business method or business function is a collection of related, structured activities or tasks by people or equipment in which a specific sequence produces a service or product (serves a particular business goal) for a parti ...

es and protects its employees, assets, services, and functions. Mission Assurance addresses risks in a uniform and systematic manner across the entire enterprise. Mission Assurance is an emerging cross-functional discipline that demands its contributors (project management, governance, system architecture, design, development, integration, testing, and operations) provide and guarantee their combined performance in use. The

United States Department of Defense The United States Department of Defense (DoD, USDOD or DOD) is an executive branch department of the federal government charged with coordinating and supervising all agencies and functions of the government directly related to national secu ...

8500-series of policies has three defined mission assurance categories that form the basis for

availability In reliability engineering, the term availability has the following meanings: * The degree to which a system, subsystem or equipment is in a specified operable and committable state at the start of a mission, when the mission is called for at a ...

and

integrity Integrity is the practice of being honest and showing a consistent and uncompromising adherence to strong moral and ethical principles and values. In ethics, integrity is regarded as the honesty and truthfulness or accuracy of one's actions. Inte ...

requirements. A Mission Assurance Category (MAC) is assigned to all DoD systems . It reflects the importance of an information system for the successful completion of a DoD mission. It also determines the requirements for availability and integrity. * MAC I systems handle information vital to the operational readiness or effectiveness of deployed or contingency forces. Because the loss of MAC I data would cause severe damage to the successful completion of a DoD mission, MAC I systems must maintain the highest levels of both integrity and availability and use the most rigorous measure of protection. * MAC II systems handle information important to the support of deployed and contingency forces. The loss of MAC II systems could have a significant negative impact on the success of the mission or operational readiness. The loss of integrity of MAC II data is unacceptable; therefore MAC II systems must maintain the highest level of integrity. The loss of availability of MAC II data can be tolerated only for a short period of time, so MAC II systems must maintain a medium level of availability. MAC II systems require protective measures above industry best practices to ensure adequate integrity and availability of data. * MAC III systems handle information that is necessary for day-to-day operations, but not directly related to the support of deployed or contingency forces. The loss of MAC III data would not have an immediate impact on the effectiveness of a mission or operational readiness. Since the loss of MAC III data would not have a significant impact on mission effectiveness or operational readiness in the short term, MAC III systems are required to maintain basic levels of integrity and availability. MAC III systems must be protected by measures considered as industry best practices. NASA'
Process Based Mission Assurance Knowledge Based System
is an implementation of Mission Assurance that provides "quick and easy access to critical Safety & Mission Assurance data... across all NASA programs and projects."

External links

Mission Assurance in a Budget-Constrained Environment: 29th National Space Symposium
April 2013. Addresses "mission assurance" as the term is used in the US Department of Defense space launch industry for military payloads (with one definition given at approximately 12:00 ff. in the video).

References

{{Reflist Reliability engineering Military space program of the United States

Aspects of Mission Assurance

See also

External links

References