Concurrent AIV as a method to hard tailor test- and model philosophies in times of need

Abstract

MASCOT, a small 11 kg prototype Asteroid Lander on-board JAXA’s Hayabusa2 space probe, was launched on December 3rd, 2014, and arrived at its destined target asteroid (162173) Ryugu on June 27, 2018. MASCOT was separated from its mother spacecraft and successfully landed on October 3rd, 2018, accomplishing the first ever landing of a European spacecraft on the surface of an asteroid. To catch this particular launch opportunity its development timeline needed to be heavily compressed. In particular, the kick-off for hardware production was released in February 2012, only 2 years before the initially planned delivery of the flight unit. Due to this compact schedule, current and well established verification processes could not be followed in order to finalize the project in the given time. But by applying a unique mix of conventional and tailored model philosophies it was possible to dynamical adapt the test program to accomplish for the shortest planning and a suitable weighing of costs and risks. A strategy of Concurrent Assembly, Integration and Verification (C-AIV) helped to identify and mitigate design and manufacturing issues and shortened the test timeline further from a general 4–5 year C/D-phase down to 2,5 year C/D-phase. This short article outlines the general idea of the applied method which could be used by AIV and System Engineers in a general tailoring process for projects of similar nature which could be run in an alternative and much faster way, if the circumstances would call for it.Concurrent AIV, a new agile methodology to hard tailor test and model philosophies for space projects is presented,The methodology is based on parallelization of test activities, creation of independent unique test threads and synergizing their dependencies at key points,On the baseline of the asteroid lander MASCOT, this methodology has been successfully applied to shorten the overall test and implementation schedule to only 2.5 years.