A containment vault for a shuttle return of a Mars sample
- Paper ID
IAF-02-Q.3.1.10
- author
- company
NASA Johnson Space Center
- country
U.S.A.
- year
2002
- abstract
In a relatively short period of time, roughly 12 weeks, the Advanced Design Team at the Johnson Space Center (JSC), developed and analyzed a set of requirements and proposed a design for, a containment vault needed in a Mai's sample return scenario that utilized a Shuttle capture for the final leg of the journey. This design was a part of a larger sample return architecture being proposed by JSC. The requirements, combined with a probability risk assessment (PRA) done by Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), were used to create a design for a shuttle-carried vault for holding a spacecraft returned from Mars with a sample container. This Vault was designed to try and attain containment assurance of the sample to 1 in a million, when combined with the Shuttle’s worst-case probability of failure during entry. The resulting design was therefore contingent upon having an accurate understanding of Shuttle failures and crash scenarios, as containment would be affected by a Shuttle catastrophe. The study has produced a high-level design for a possible Vault, housed in the Shuttle, which stands very close to meeting the difficult containment assurance requirement for planetary protection (per the NASA Planetar y Protection Officer).