The Mars analog missions of the Austrian Space Forum (OeWF) within the framework of the AMADEE program take place on Earth but are not devoid of any risk. Indeed, for participants of such missions it means being sent to very remote and desolate places.

That’s why analysis and verification of safety is regularly needed as part of a safety case to make sure no one participating in such a mission bears unacceptable risks to live and health. In order to account for the ever-rising complexity of those missions OeWF is now using advanced techniques from systems engineering and system safety disciplines. To this end, OeWF and SCERTAS GmbH – a company specializing in developing and accessing safety concepts and safety cases – cooperated to develop a software tool to simplify the construction of compelling safety cases for future analog missions.

For this a graphical model of the technical systems and operations of an AMADEE mission was created in SysML (a standardized description language for complex systems) and linked to the safety argument developed in GSN (a specialized notation for safety arguments) now also embedded in the model.

With the help of this software tool it will be (relatively) easy in the future to trace for mission planning and mission execution that

• all risks are identified and appropriately controlled
• all parts of an AMADEE mission including experiments are considered

SCERTAS GmbH on its part already uses this jointly developed tool for ongoing industrial projects and EU research activities.

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