engineering

Mission assurance

Mission assurance is a engineering topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Mission assurance rather than just read about it. In short: Mission Assurance is a full life-cycle engineering process to identify and mitigate design, production, test, and field support deficiencies threatening mission success. Aspects of Mission Assurance Mission Assurance includes the disciplined application of system engineering, risk management, quality, and management principles to achieve success of a design, development, testing, deployment, and operations process.

Key takeaways

Mission assurance belongs to engineering; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Mission assurance to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Mission assurance from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Mission Assurance is a full life-cycle engineering process to identify and mitigate design, production, test, and field support deficiencies threatening mission success.

Aspects of Mission Assurance Mission Assurance includes the disciplined application of system engineering, risk management, quality, and management principles to achieve success of a design, development, testing, deployment, and operations process. Mission Assurance's ideal is achieving 100% customer success every time. Mission Assurance reaches across the enterprise, supply base, business partners, and customer base to enable customer success. The ultimate goal of Mission Assurance is to create a state of resilience that supports the continuation of an agency's critical business processes and protects its employees, assets, services, and functions. Mission Assurance addresses risks in a uniform and systematic manner across the entire enterprise. Mission Assurance is an emerging cross-functional discipline that demands its contributors (project management, governance, system architecture, design, development, integration, testing, and operations) provide and guarantee their combined performance in use. The United States Department of Defense 8500-series of policies has three defined mission assurance categories that form the basis for availability and integrity requirements.

A Mission Assurance Category (MAC) is assigned to all DoD systems . It reflects the importance of an information system for the successful completion of a DoD mission. It also determines the requirements for availability and integrity.

MAC I systems handle information vital to the operational readiness or effectiveness of deployed or contingency forces. Because the loss of MAC I data would cause severe damage to the successful completion of a DoD mission, MAC I systems must maintain the highest levels of both integrity and availability and use the most rigorous measure of protection. MAC II systems handle information important to the support of deployed and contingency forces. The loss of MAC II systems could have a significant negative impact on the success of the mission or operational readiness. The loss of integrity of MAC II data is unacceptable; therefore MAC II systems must maintain the highest level of integrity. The loss of availability of MAC II data can be tolerated only for a short period of time, so MAC II systems must maintain a medium level of availability. MAC II systems require protective measures above industry best practices to ensure adequate integrity and availability of data. MAC III systems handle information that is necessary for day-to-day operations, but not directly related to the support of deployed or contingency forces. The loss of MAC III data would not have an immediate impact on the effectiveness of a mission or operational readiness. Since the loss of MAC III data would not have a significant impact on mission effectiveness or operational readiness in the short term, MAC III systems are required to maintain basic levels of integrity and availability. MAC III systems must be protected by measures considered as industry best practices. NASA's Process Based Mission Assurance Knowledge Management System is an implementation of Mission Assurance that provides "quick and easy access to critical Safety & Mission Assurance data... across all NASA programs and projects."

See also eMASS Information Assurance Reliability engineering Quality engineering Risk management Availability Integrity

References

External links Mission Assurance in a Budget-Constrained Environment: 29th National Space Symposium, April 2013. Addresses "mission assurance" as the term is used in the US Department of Defense space launch industry for military payloads (with one definition given at approximately 12:00 ff. in the video).

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Mission assurance

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Mission assurance claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In engineering, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Mission assurance before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Mission assurance ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Mission assurance

In research: Mission assurance appears in engineering research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Mission assurance in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Mission assurance is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Military space program of the United States, Reliability engineering, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Mission assurance outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Mission assurance in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Mission assurance means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Mission assurance out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Mission assurance in simple terms?

Mission Assurance is a full life-cycle engineering process to identify and mitigate design, production, test, and field support deficiencies threatening mission success. Aspects of Mission Assurance Mission Assurance includes the disciplined application of system engineering, risk management, quali…

Why does Mission assurance matter?

Because it connects several engineering ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Mission assurance?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Mission assurance.