Rockets vibrate, shake and flex intensely as they climb into space, and spacecraft packed with delicate scientific instruments must survive those forces. Before any rocket leaves the ground, NASA engineers work to predict how those stresses will affect every part of a spacecraft. To do that, the Dynamic Environments Group within the agency's Launch team has refined its shock and vibration analysis methods, aiming to anticipate with greater fidelity the mechanical environment the payload will face.

Predicting these dynamic environments is a critical step in the design of any mission: if the loads are underestimated, an instrument can be damaged during launch; if they are overestimated, the hardware is overbuilt and valuable mass that could be devoted to science is lost. The group's work focuses on characterising how vibrations and shocks propagate through the launch vehicle structure to the spacecraft, a problem that combines ground-test data, structural models and measurements from previous flights.

The improvement introduced by NASA engineers allows the response of systems to these loads to be analysed more precisely, refining the tools used to estimate the acoustic and mechanical vibration levels the payload will experience. A more reliable analysis translates into prototypes better prepared for the real conditions of liftoff and into a reduced risk of failure during the most demanding phases of flight.

These tools are particularly relevant for upcoming scientific missions, whose instruments — telescopes, detectors and highly sensitive sensors — must arrive intact at their destination orbit. With a better characterised launch environment, design teams can adjust the isolation and mounting of each component with greater confidence, and the agency will have a firmer basis for planning future launches.