scope:

Description of Driving Event:

In support of obtaining flight certification for space flight experiment, there is a requirement and it is standard practice to perform both safety and verification testing. A similar requirement to provide functional performance testing does not exist. Functional performance testing is left to the discretion of project management or to the payload element developer. Ames Research Center has found that the performance of full functional performance testing helps to characterize hardware parameters, identify weak design and circumvent potential in-flight anomalies.