scope:

Practice:

The development of in-flight instrumentation, vehicle health management systems, and sensor systems for control and monitoring should be thoroughly integrated into the requirements generation, preliminary design, and early planning for payloads and space flight systems. Multi-disciplinary Product Development Teams (PDTs) must include instrumentation considerations at the very front end of the development process. This will allow maximum advantage to be gained from current and emerging technologies to provide both real time and postflight diagnostics that will reliably and consistently reflect the system's condition. The result will be improved vehicle and payload system reliability through accurate and well-planned access to performance information. Emphasis must be placed on early definition of instrumentation and measurement requirements to reduce the time and cost to develop reliable instrumentation systems and ensure mission success.