Quality Engineering Support
ESA's Product Assurance and Safety (PA&S) engineers are responsible for failure-proofing missions by ensuring that the materials, mechanical parts, processes and electrical components used to assemble a spacecraft or launcher shall be fit for purpose over the entire life of a mission.
They do this by providing engineering support to all ESA activities, verifying compliance to Product Assurance requirements. They represent an independent technical authority in the materials, mechanical parts, processes and electrical component domains, while also providing bespoke space environmental exposure facilities for use in support of European programmes.
They also seek to secure the availability of qualified materials, parts, processes and personnel to all ESA missions, future-proofing them by guaranteeing short, medium and long-term access to critical technologies, monitoring industry trends across all technical domains to help underpin Europe's competitiveness in the space sector.
Our engineers are also tasked with establishing and implementing requirements and standards for the development and procurement of space-grade materials, components and related processes of maintaining European standards for space. These ensure consistency and agreement across the entire space sector in the quality of European products.
Space projects rely on embedded PA&S engineers to ensure hardware and software quality, product reliability, electronic components, standards, materials, mechanical parts, critical industrial fabrication processes and configuration control.
Related activities
RAMS = Reliability Availability Maintainability Safety
Support provided for External entities
The RAMS Section also provides RAMS support to external entities in the frame of collaboration. In particular a collaboration has been established between ESA and European Southern Observatory (ESO), where ESA is providing RAMS consultancy in support to Extremely Large Telescope (ELT).
Software process assessment and improvement (S4S)
The Software Product Assurance Section has the capability to conduct S4S assessments to give an overall determination of the organization's capabilities for delivering software products in line with ECSS-Q-ST-80C (Rev.1).
S4S is SPICE (Software Process Improvement and Capability dEtermination) for Space.
It is:
A method of evaluating space software processes.
Conformant to ISO/IEC 15504 (Process Assessment).
Developed under ESA contract for the space industry.
Conformant to Process Reference Model reflected in ECSS-E-ST-40C and ECSS-ST-Q-80C.
Alert System
The ESA Alert System (EAS) ensures awareness of failures and problems experienced in ESA space projects.
It is based on prompt exchange of information among all registered participants of the system.
Each Alert report is SENSITIVE and shall not be distributed outside registered members group.
Every registered user can contribute to the creation of an ESA alert by reporting an issue to the EAS Focal Point via the Initiate Alert page (accessible only after login).