A New Approach to Mission Classification and Risk Management for NASA Space Flight Missions

The NASA risk classification system is meant to uide space mission development from formulation through completion of implementation. It is also meant to be the basis on which program and project managers develop and implement appropriate mission assurance and risk management strategies for the mission. In order to be useful, the risk classification system needs to provide consistent and reproducible classification results so that missions may be designed with the appropriate components, subsystems, and testing philosophy, all of which impacts mission schedule and cost. In a cost-constrained environment, a clear, robust, and reproducible approach to mission implementation becomes more critical than ever before. Once a project's risk classification level is established, the managers can define the appropriate management controls, systems engineering processes, mission assurance requirements, safety, and testing for that mission. The current NASA mission classification system will be reviewed before a new system is proposed.NASA manages space flight missions according to a four-tiered classification which assumes increasing levels of risk. We argue that risk does not change between classes. What changes are the means available to reduce risk. In performance-driven missions, the project will spend money in order to maintain performance without reducing margins. In cost-constrained missions, performance will be reduced in order to stay within budget or to maintain schedule: measurement requirements may be traded, design life may be reduced, or both. We then propose a new approach to the classification of NASA space flight missions, based on an assessment of how flexible the requirements, how exquisite the measurements, how long the lifetime, and how rigid the budget.Our proposed approach makes possible a clearer differentiation between classification levels and more effective guidance to program and project managers

Valuing Rigor in the Risk Management Process

NASA, as an organization, takes risk management (RM) seriously, and for most projects, the risk management process is exemplar. There can be challenges, though, with defining RM processes. For example, many different risk analysis methodologies are available, they can be applied with varying degrees of rigor, and they can have different value depending on how projects use them. In particular, risk analysis methodologies vary considerably in the level of quantitative detail, with more probabilistic techniques encouraged in some situations. We discussed these processes and methodologies with ten project managers (PM) at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). Our intent was not to prove with some level of statistical significance that some are more helpful than others, but rather to obtain a general understanding of how projects are identifying, and thinking, about risks. This paper describes some of the available risk processes and methodologies, and provides some insights about the benefits that can gained from their use. We provide an in-depth discussion of one quantitative methodology, Probabilistic Risk Assessments (PRAs), and conclude with a few insights from observed best practices

A Guide for Traffic Safety Practitioners: Best Practices for Increasing Seat Belt Use in Rural Communities

Rural motor vehicle occupants are at an increased risk for crash-related deaths compared to their urban counter-parts. One contributing factor is the lower use of seat belts in rural areas compared to urban areas. Seat belts are one of the most important strategies for reducing crash-related injuries and fatalities among road users. Preventing crash-related injuries and fatalities requires programs that promote seat belt use among rural drivers and passengers. Rural traffic safety practitioners can implement best practices, including evidence-based and promising programs, to increase seat belt use in rural areas. The Best Practices Guide for Increasing Seat Belt Use in Rural Communities is designed for rural traffic safety practitioners to plan, implement, and evaluate programs to increase seat belt use in rural communities. The guide describes evidence-based and promising seat belt programs, and shares lessons learned from traffic safety practitioners and experts. It also includes examples of seat belt programs that have been successfully adapted for use in different settings, including rural communities. The guide was informed by a literature review and environmental scan, and discussions with traffic safety practitioners and experts. It contains four modules to help traffic safety practitioners develop, implement, and evaluate rural seat belt programs: understanding seat belt use in rural communities; selecting evidence-based or promising rural seat belt program models; implementing a rural seat belt program; and evaluating a rural seat belt program

Courting the South: Lula’s Trade Diplomacy

Scholarly consensus regarding Brazil's Lula government characterizes its economic policy as surprisingly conservative but its foreign policy as roughly in line with the traditionally leftist principles of the Workers' Party. While broadly accurate, this perspective tells us little about trade diplomacy, which cuts across these two policy areas. In this article we explain why Lula's trade diplomacy has hewed much more closely to his broader foreign policy strategy than his economic model, despite the critical role of trade in Brazil's recent economic growth. We argue that two key factors have lowered the costs of adopting a combative, South-South orientation, allowing Lula to use trade diplomacy as a tool for appealing to party loyalists. One is the inherently muted short-term impact of trade diplomacy on key macro-economic outcomes. The other is the failure of the traditional trading powers to offer the incentives necessary to successfully conclude the major North-South trade talks they had initiated

Exposition to Factors of the Investment Funds Market in Brazil

ABSTRACT The growth of the investment funds industry in Brazil and its international representativeness indicate the relevance of analyzing this sector. Literature has shown the effects that market factors can have on the performance of investment funds. One way of evaluating the relation between funds' returns and market factors' variations is the return-based style analysis. In this context, this research aimed to investigate, through the style analysis, the exposition to various market factors in two modalities of investment funds. With this analysis, we may infer differences between the allocations and the composition of portfolios, constructing a panorama of sensitivity of funds' returns to the market factors addressed in the study. The database consisted of daily returns of 508 funds, out of which 385 are fixed income funds and 123 are Neutral Long & Short multimarket funds, within the period from January 3, 2005, to July 11, 2014. Through the style analysis, with 6 market factors, we found a difference between the composition of portfolios of multimarket funds and portfolios of fixed income funds. Regarding the evolution of the composition of portfolios in these funds, we observed that the investment style of funds does not seem to be constant over time, something which may be a positive evidence concerning the changes that managers promote in their portfolios, seeking to achieve better profitability indicators

Direitos de propriedade da terra rural no Brasil: uma proposta institucionalista para ampliar a governança fundiária

O artigo discute, sob uma perspectiva institucionalista, a dimensão do problema fundiário brasileiro expresso pela fragilidade dos direitos de propriedade da terra rural. Além dos condicionantes históricos referidos no texto, o artigo chama a atenção para o papel das instituições de registro e cadastro de imóveis que, por estarem separadas e não integradas, favorecem as práticas de fraude, apossamento e potencializam os conflitos fundiários. O artigo conclui com uma proposta de mudança institucional, baseada no aumento da governança da terra, no recente contexto favorável ao aperfeiçoamento da estrutura de direitos de propriedade da terra

Paper Session II-B - NASA Earth Observing (EOS) Program Overview and the EOS Space Segment

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Explanation of Change (EoC) Study: Considerations and Implementation Challenges

This paper discusses the implementation of considerations resulting from a study investigating the cost change experienced by historical NASA science missions. The study investigated historical milestone and monthly status report documentation followed by interviews with key project personnel. The reasons for cost change were binned as being external to NASA, external to the project and internal to the project relative to the project's planning and execution. Based on the results of the binning process and the synthesis of project meetings and interviews, ten considerations were made with the objective to decrease the potential for cost change in future missions. Although no one magic bullet consideration was discovered, the considerations taken as a whole should help reduce cost and schedule change in future NASA missions

X-chromosome Gene Order in Different Mus Species Crosses

The advent of molecular genetics heralds a new era in linkage analysis. It is now possible to map any locus and define its linkage relationship within the mammalian genome using a single set of informative offspring. This new mapping methodology, which has been used successfully to map both autosomal genes and sex-linked loci, utilizes naturally occurring polymorphisms at the level of the nucleotide sequence between inbred strains of mice and those derived from the wild species Mus spretus and Mus musculus. In their study of chromosome 4, Nadeau et al. suggested there was a potential rearrangement in gene order between the laboratory mouse and wild-derived M. spretus. Additional data now suggests that there may also be a difference in the arrangement of genes within the t-complex on chromosome 17. The t-complex, however, is quite unusual in that inversional rearrangements have been reported even among closely related M. musculus and M. domesticus populations in the wild. If rearrangements in gene order have occurred between the more evolutionarily divergent Mus species it may limit the usefulness of interspecific crosses for ordering genes within the mouse genome. Structural rearrangements in the genome may be an important mechanism for the maintenance of speciation, since they (i) inhibit illegitimate recombination which might otherwise lead to a loss or duplication of information, and (ii) affect normal chromosomal assortment. If there are such rearrangements among the Mus species, they are not cytogenetically detectable, since karyotypic analysis suggests that there is little, if any, difference in the physical appearance of chromosomes among diverse Mus species. In an attempt to address the issues of (i) interspecies variation in gene order, and (ii) possible differences in relative recombination frequencies within interspecific crosses, such crosses were constructed between the inbred laboratory strain C57BL/6JRos and two different wild-derived Mus species: M. musculus from Denmark and M. spretus. For reasons of historical interest, we began our study by examining markers on the mouse X chromosome. Analysis of major and minor satellite sequences and dispersed repeated elements shows no qualitative differences between these mice and laboratory strains