scope:

Description of Driving Event:

Since 1980, the Materials Engineering Branch has been involved in operational life testing of spacecraft components. These include encoder lamps and light emitting diodes, calibration lamps, signal amplifiers and support bearings for scanning mechanisms. Many of these life tests were initiated to demonstrate that life sensitive components would meet mission lifetime requirements. Several of the life tests were also used to determine the cause of in-flight failures of components. Besides demonstrating that a component would meet mission lifetime requirements, these life tests also determined useful lifetime and long-term behavior of components. In some cases, the behavior of a component at the beginning of life was used to develop screening techniques to select longer lived parts.