Lessons Learned from the OCO-2 Mission

The OCO-2 mission was launched on July 2nd 2014 on the first of the last set of Delta II rockets to be launched from Vandenberg Air force Base. It is currently operating in the Atrain and collecting data that will help scientists to understand the global carbon cycle. As with all NASA missions the OCO-2 mission gathered lessons from all of the engineers, scientists and managers that worked on bringing the mission to fruition. The OCO-2 team has learned a great deal in the process of building and testing this spacecraft, the details of some of those lessons will be discussed as follows: The first lesson from OCO-2 is that rebuilding a mission does not necessarily mean that it will be cheaper. While some cost savings may be gained by using a previous design, many other factors can affect the construction of the new mission that can drive the cost up. Heritage designs need to be fully understood by the implementing team. While this may seem obvious, there is a strong push when implementing a heritage design to focus on implementing it and not spending time on understanding it, just because a design exists does not mean it is flawless. High software heritage assumptions should be reviewed in detail & watched closely. A high software heritage assumption, requires that nothing change about any other aspect of the design project in question, and while this might be an ideal, it rarely occurs in practice. In this paper we will present a detailed discussion of these and other lessons that were learned by OCO-2 team and outline suggestions on how best to take them into account on future missions. INTRODUCTION One of the objectives in the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 is to provide for “The improvement of the usefulness, performance, speed, safety, and efficiency of aeronautical and space vehicles” [1]. In order to do this the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) throughout the years have collected lessons from both successful and unsuccessful missions. Consistent with this an OCO-2 document containing formulation and implementation lessons learned through launch was prepared. This paper will not go into the same level of detail as that document, but will focus on some of the more pivotal lessons learned from the OCO-2 mission development.