Pathfinding the Future of Spacecraft Protection with Project-Specific Threat Impact Assessments

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) is pathfinding the future of spacecraft protection by developing a Project-Specific Threat Impact Assessment (PSTIA) process. JPL’s Mission Protection Office (MPO), part of the Office of the Chief Engineer, in coordination with protection subject matter experts (SMEs) from The Aerospace Corporation developed this process to provide projects with an assessment of the in-space threats (both intentional and unintentional) relevant to each project. These project-specific assessments contain individualized, actionable information. They directly support the needs of projects to assess applicable adversarial threats and manage associated risk to meet the project protection planning requirements of NASA NPR 7120.5F and NASA STD-1006A. The MPO is formalizing the process of providing this valuable information to the project’s systems engineering and risk management processes, and to ensure it’s consistent and available for all future JPL missions. This paper will discuss the importance and benefits of providing actionable threat data to inform projects’ engineering and operations concept decisions, describe the methodology for performing the assessments and how they fit into the overall mission lifecycle, outline lessons learned, and discuss successes of the PSTIA process. It will also describe the roadmap for the future of the PSTIAs at JPL and across NASA.