Engineering reliability for the NEPTUNE observatory

This paper reviews aspects of engineering for reliability of the proposed NEPTUNE observatory. NEPTUNE has an equipment life requirement of around 30 years, and (because of the local weather) presents limited opportunity for repair. It is necessary to use methods and parts that assure the system are sufficiently reliable and maintainable. Among the factors that influence construction are appropriate parts selection criteria, quality assurance inspections, through testing of hardware, understanding and accommodating the shock environment of deployment and maintenance cycles, assuring that there will not be material compatibility issues, minimizing the risk that software will result in system failure, analyzing the hardware designs to assure that they should still work correctly after 30 years and that failures do not propagate, and tracking all anomalies to make sure they are appropriately resolved.