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This final report, dated September 10, 1996, was prepared by the Research Triangle Institute for the Department of the Air Force's 45th and 30th Space Wing safety offices. Titled Modeling Unlikely Space-Booster Failures in Risk Calculations, it shows how rare Mode-5 failures, in which a rocket veers well off its intended flight line, are modeled in the DAMP risk-analysis program. An appendix lists Atlas, Delta, Titan and Thor launch and failure histories through August 1996.
From the source:Release of 2026-05-08 Incident: 9/10/96, N/A. This report describes the Modeling of Unlikely Space-Booster Failures in Risk Calculations, documenting historical launch failure modes and recommending corrective actions to address them using novel modelling techniques.
“Mission Control”17 pages
6. Shaping Constants Through Simulation Since adequate test data are not available to establish the Mode-5 shaping constants empirically, other methods are needed for this purpose. It will be recalled that, after vehicle pitchover, any malfunction with the potential to cause a substantial deviation from the intended flight line is, by definition, a Mode-5 failure response. The malfunction need not actually cause a large deviation to be classified as a Mode-5 response. One such class of failures leading to a Mode-5 response has been termed a random-attitude failure. Such responses can result from guidance and control failures that lead to erroneous orientation of the guidance platform or an erroneous spatial target. Another class of failures that can cause sustained deviation away from the flight line is the slow turn, where the engine nozzle, in effect, locks in some fixed position, generally but not necessarily near null. Both types of malfunctions have been investigated in an attempt to estimate numerical values for Mode-5 shaping constants A and B. Basically, the idea is to (1) run a large sample of random-attitude and slow-tum failures, (2) calculate the percentages of impacts in five-degree sectors from 0° to 180°, (3) compare these percentages with those obtained from the Mode-5 impact density function when specific values are assigned to A and B, and (4) assign values to A and B until the best pos~ible fit is obtained between the simulated-tum impacts and the theoretical Mode-5 impacts. 6.1 Malfunction Turn Slmulatlons 6.1.1 Random-Attitude Failures A guidance and control failure leading to a fixed erroneous direction of thrust is termed a random-attitude failure. Such failures represent a subset of possible Mode-5 failure responses. Random-attitude failures can be used to establish the maximum possible region of impact, given that a vehicle has flown normally for a specified period of time. For this purpose RTI has developed a Random-Attitude Failure Impact Point (RAFIP) program written in Fortran (3900 lines of code) for execution on a personal computer. Using a Monte Carlo approach, program RAFIP first selects a starting time and then a random thrust direction on the attitude sphere, with all directions having the same chance of being chosen. Each Monte-Carlo run is begun using the nominal vehicle position and velocity at the selected start time, assuming an instantaneous change in thrust direction. Thrust is applied continuously in the selected random direction, and the equations of motion are numerically integrated until one of four conditions is satisfied: (1) final stage burnout occurs, (2) the vehicle impacts while thrusting, (3) orbital insertion occurs, (4) the vehicle breaks up due to aerodynamic forces For conditions (1) and (4), the trajectory is extended to impact using Kepler's equations. For condition (3), an impact point does not exist. The process just described is repeated 9/10/% 31 RT!
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Report, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 181 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.