scope:

Description of Driving Event:

During the critical initial on orbit operations and checkout phase, ground station personnel did not monitor the Lewis spacecraft continuously for anomalies. This was accepted based on a false belief that the spacecraft had a stable safe-mode that it would switch to automatically if anomalies were not immediately corrected. (In the Lewis implementation, the safe-mode was neither stable nor robust.) The situation was further exacerbated by the fact the spacecraft was in an interim (low altitude) orbit which had high drag and short on-station communications intervals and for which the designers had not carried out modeling.