Joe Mrozinski

A structured approach to strategic decision making for NASA's technology development

A method for collecting quantitative technology development information and matching it with capability needs of future NASA missions is described.

NASA instrument cost/schedule model Hamid Habib-Agahi

NASAs Office of Independent Program and Cost Evaluation (IPCE) has established a number of initiatives to improve its cost and schedule-estimating capabilities.12 One of these initiatives has resulted in the JPL-developed NASA Instrument Cost Model (NICM). NICM is an instrument cost and schedule estimator that contains the following: A system-level cost-estimation tool, a subsystem-level cost-estimation tool, a database of cost and technical parameters of over 140 previously flown NASA remote-sensing and in-situ instruments, a schedule estimator, a set of rules to estimate cost and schedule by life cycle phases (B/C/D), and a novel tool for developing joint probability distributions for cost and schedule risk (Joint Confidence Level (JCL)). This paper describes the development and use of NICM, including the data-normalization processes, data-mining methods (cluster analysis, principal components analysis, regression analysis and bootstrap cross validation), the estimating equations themselves and a demonstration of the NICM tool suite.

Mobility productivity impacts on selection of lunar exploration architectures

The productivity of scientific exploration of the Moon and Mars has been significantly improved through the mobility of roving vehicles (rovers) since these vehicles allow scientists to conduct operations well beyond the immediate vicinity of the landing area. This paper reports on a quantitative approach developed to evaluate the productivity of alternative human and robot work-system alternatives for a lunar science mission. A graph-search approach for task planning was used for assigning human and robotic work systems to scientific tasks in order to evaluate the productivity of different mobility options. The results were used to identify the benefits and costs of alternative rover combinations in order to establish guidelines for the roles of the different vehicle types. Pressurized rovers displayed advantages over unpressurized rovers due to enhanced range and duration yielding more science productivity. Multiple pressurized rovers were found to be more productive than multiple unpressurized rovers.