scope:

Description of Driving Event:

The Terra spacecraft relied on several state-of-the-art developments, as a result of the demanding resource requirements of the Terra instrument suite. These spacecraft development activities were performed in parallel with five state-of-the-art remote sensing instrument developments. Due to the nature of this extensive development, it was anticipated that difficulties and schedule challenges would arise on both sides of this interface. The challenge, which faced the Project, was how to mitigate the risk of verification of this interface, particularly when that flight interface might not be verified until very late in the systems integration schedule. The challenge was compounded by the fact that two of the Terra instruments were international instruments.