Epidemiology of satellite anomalies and failures: A subsystem-centric approach

Epidemiology is the basic science of public health and it investigates the distribution, frequency, rates, and drivers of health-related states and illnesses in specific populations. We adopt in this article some of Epidemiology's concepts and approaches, and instead of human population and diseases, we focus on a satellite population and its on-orbit anomalies and failures. A total of 168 satellites were analyzed in this work, and they have logged 968.5 years on orbit. We analyze an extensive database of geosynchronous satellite anomalies and failures (retrospective cohort study) and develop for each spacecraft subsystem a health scorecard synthesizing its track record of on-orbit failure events. We include results on the severity of the failure events in each subsystem's health scorecard (distribution and rates). We also provide for each subsystem its failure concentration ratio or the extent to which a single satellite in our population has experienced multiple failure events from the same subsystem. Next, having derived health scorecards for ten satellite subsystems identified in the database, we conduct a comparative analysis of the propensity and severity of failures between these subsystems. We identify for example several major subsystems driving on-orbit failure events, such as the Thruster/Fuel, the Solar Array, the Payload, and the Telemetry Tracking and Command (TTC) subsystems. In addition, we find that the Control Processor, the Mechanisms, and the Solar Array Deployment subsystems are sufficiently robust and contribute a minor share to the overall failure events on orbit. Furthermore, we find for example that while the attitude control subsystem and the Batteries exhibit roughly similar average failure rates, they have very different behaviors in terms of the severity of anomalies they experience: the former primarily failing “soft” (minor anomaly), whereas the latter, the batteries most often fail “hard” with major non-repairable degradations that affect operation of a satellite on a permanent basis. The results here provided should prove helpful to satellite manufacturers by allowing them to hone in on problematic subsystems that would benefit most from reliability improvements.