Brief Description:
NOAA's National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC) in Boulder, Colorado, maintains
a data base of spacecraft anomalies, ranging from minor operational problems to
permanent spacecraft failures. The data base includes anomalies primarily from
geostationary spacecraft as well as near-Earth and interplanetary space
failures. It currently contains 2779 events from 1971 to the present. Events
were contributed from seven countries: Australia, Canada, Germany, India,
Japan, the U.K., and the U.S.A. Data suppliers usually provide the anomaly type
and diagnosis. The Spacecraft Anomaly Manager (SAM) software allows the user to
select specific anomalies and to depict them in local time and seasonal
histograms. SAM was designed as a tool to investigate the relationship between
anomaly frequency and environmental factors.
Availability: On two diskettes for use on PCs (Data Base and SAM, $60) from NGDC
References:
D. C. Wilkinson, Trends in Environmentally Induced Spacecraft Anomalies, in:
NASA/SDIO Space Environmental Effects on Materials Workshop, 123-131, NASA
Conference Publication 3035, Part 1, Washington, D.C., 1989.
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