Spacecraft Systems Engineering - Max Mitchell;Ironbridge Press

Every spacecraft built since has had to survive that environment, and the ones that fail to survive it usually fail quietly: a bit flipped in memory, a solar cell degraded a few percent per year, a surface eroded by atomic oxygen until its optical properties no longer match the thermal model.

None of those failures announce themselves. They are budgeted for, years before launch, or they are not survived.>Sixteen chapters follow one continuous thread. A mission objective becomes a written requirement. The requirement becomes a budget of mass, power, and data. The budget is allocated to subsystems with margin. Every allocation is verified before the vehicle flies.

Inside the book: How to choose a shielding thickness against a total-dose requirement, and why shielding does comparatively little against the effects that flip a single bitWhat a spacecraft's thermal cycle count actually reaches over a six-year mission, and what that number does to a mechanismHow to estimate end-of-life solar array power once radiation damage has been accounted forWhy a spacecraft with eight subsystems that each meet their written specification can still fail its missionThe full delta-v arithmetic behind a transfer to geostationary orbit, and the propellant mass it costs in kilogramsHow to close a radio link budget in decibels, and which term to change first when it will not closeThe one question to ask before adding a redundant unit Every chapter opens with learning objectives, defines its vocabulary where it is first needed, and ends with practice problems and an answer key, so a method can be exercised rather than only read.

Written for engineers moving into spacecraft work from another discipline, graduate students who need the numbers behind the block diagrams, and subsystem specialists asked to hold the whole vehicle in view.