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Download PDF: NESC Develops Method for Estimating Risk When Reducing NDE 

Performing nondestructive evaluation (NDE) can have both cost and schedule impacts, leading some to question whether descoping (i.e., reducing or eliminating) NDE inspections on certain spaceflight hardware could be possible. However, this approach would be counter to NASA’s Technical Standard NASA-STD-5019A, which outlines the spaceflight system requirements for establishing a fracture control plan—one that relies on design, analysis, testing, NDE, and tracking of fracture-critical parts to verify damage tolerance and mitigate catastrophic failure. 

Under the 5019A framework, damage smaller than the NDE detection capability is assumed to exist, but through analysis or test, the part being evaluated must be shown to survive the required service life. In practice, NDE’s role is to screen out flaws that otherwise may result in failure. However, in some cases, descoping NDE from the damage tolerance verification process could be useful and still provide the required level of safety.   

The NESC conducted an assessment to help answer the question of whether rationale could be found for achieving an equivalent risk posture without using the traditional 5019A approach to damage tolerance. The objective was to develop a probabilistic analysis method that would allow NASA programs and projects to estimate risk associated with descoping the NDE requirements of single-wrought materials. This effort included using historical data to demonstrate the method, performing sensitivity studies, and identifying the minimum supporting data that would be required for approving a descoping request. 

Descoping NDE from Damage Tolerance 

Damage tolerance is typically treated as deterministic: an NDE detection threshold is established as a fixed flaw size with an associated binary outcome (flaw exists/does not exist), and failure is based on a conservative analysis or test with a binary result (pass/fail). However, damage tolerance is rooted in the following probabilities:  

•  P(A): Probability that a flaw of a given size exists, 

•  P(D0│A): Probability that this flaw will be missed by NDE, and  

•  P(F│D0,A): Probability that a flaw results in failure given that it exists and was missed by NDE.  

These are combined into the joint failure probability: P(F,D0,A) = P(F│D0,A)P(D0│A)P(A) 

Damage tolerance is based on the idea that analysis and testing suggests a near-zero probability of failure below a critical initial flaw size (aCIFS) shown by the green (lower) arrow in Figure 1, and NDE results in a near-zero probability of missing a flaw above some detectability threshold (aNDE) shown by the yellow (upper) arrow in Figure 1. If these two areas overlap, then the part is damage tolerant, with a near-zero failure probability regardless of underlying probability of flaw existence, i.e., conservatively assuming that P(a>aCIFS)=1 for any flaw size does not impact the conclusion. However, if NDE is descoped, it removes the right arrow from Figure 1, and risk will increase to a value proportional to the probability P(a>aCIFS). 

Estimating P(a>aCIFS) may be intractable without expensive, high-resolution methods to characterize the frequency of flaw occurrence at a particular size for a given part. Alternatively, it may be possible to estimate P(a> aNDE), the probability of a detectable flaw existing. Assuming that a part of interest is shown to be damage tolerant prior to any NDE descope (i.e., satisfying NASA-STD-5019A), it can be assumed that (1) historical inspection data are available, and (2) aNDE > aCIFS, due to the required overlap in Figure 1. As such, it was proposed that the frequency of historical finds could be used to estimate a 95% upper confidence bound on P(a> aNDE) and thus an estimate of the risk associated with descoping. 

To demonstrate the risk-evaluation framework, the NESC gained access to a historical NDE database comprising 33,630 bolt-hole inspections over a 3-year period. In total, six crack-like features were found by NDE. Accounting for uncertainty due to sample size yielded a 95% confidence upper bound of P(a> aNDE) = 0.04% for each hole. In the proposed method, it is conservatively assumed that if a flaw exceeding the CIFS exists, then it will lead to structural failure. While conservative, this assumption was necessary based on the limitations of the database in that it lacked detected flaw sizing. Based on this assumption, P(a> aNDE) = 0.0004 yields a structural reliability of approximately 0.9996 (expressed as 3.4 “nines”).  

The results are illustrated graphically in Figure 2. In this case study, increasing the number of inspections in the dataset to 100,000 (i.e., multiplying by a factor of 3) marginally increases the number of nines to 3.5. At the observed NDE rejection rate, 4 nines of reliability are not achievable even with infinite samples and zero uncertainty. It is expected that the rejection rates and sample sizes in this case study are on the order of magnitude of what would be observed and available in practice. Since 2 nines or less would equate to a significant increase relative to the baseline risk for NASA Human Spaceflight Programs, a minimum sample size of 5,000 inspections is needed at an NDE rejection rate of 0.04%. 

There are necessary assumptions underpinning this methodology. First, time-invariant process control is required to ensure that estimated probabilities from historical inspections are predictive of future probabilities after descope. Ensuring consistency during the data collection period is a first step in verifying existing controls, and continued monitoring is necessary to verify that the process remains time-invariant. Second, while aggregating data across multiple parts can increase the inspection sample size and decrease uncertainty in estimated rejection rates, it requires aggregation rationale via qualitative and quantitative assessments of similitude. The methodology developed by the NESC is intended to be a component of a comprehensive fracture control evaluation by the NASA Fracture Control Board and the responsible Technical Authority.  

For information, contact Patrick E. Leser.  patrick.e.leser@nasa.gov 

Reference: NASA/TM-20250004074 

For most of the year, ice blankets the waterways of the northern Canadian Arctic Archipelago. But during the brief summer melt season, the stark white and gray landscape transforms into a colorful, dynamic environment. On a particularly striking day in 2022, sediment plumes and fractured sea ice traced swirling eddies in a branch of the Nansen Sound fjord system.

These satellite images show a section of Cañon Fiord, located about 115 kilometers (70 miles) southeast of the Eureka research station on west-central Ellesmere Island. Waters from the fjord flow into Greely Fiord, which connects to Nansen Sound and ultimately the Arctic Ocean. The images were acquired by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 on August 9, 2022.

Igor Dmitrenko, a physical oceanographer at the Centre for Earth Observation Science at the University of Manitoba, has studied eddies in the fjord system and notes that the water’s turbidity, a measure of its cloudiness, remains low during the ice-covered season. Freshwater runoff—and the sediment it carries—drops sharply this time of year, and the formation of 2-meter-thick sea ice shields the surface from wind, suppressing mixing that would otherwise resuspend particles.

Summer presents a contrasting scenario. The detailed image below (top) shows that the sea ice in this part of the fjord has broken up, free to drift with the currents and wind. Note that some of the pieces are likely icebergs that have broken off from nearby outlet glaciers. The second detailed image shows a similar scenario; however, in this case, it is sediment suspended in the water that is tracing the flow.

Alex Gardner and Chad Greene, glaciologists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, pointed out that the sediment plume is mostly glacial flour—rock that has been pulverized by a glacier. Surface meltwater that gets under the glacier ultimately flushes the glacial flour into the fjord, making the water appear turquoise. Glacial flour is a critical source of nutrients, specifically iron. Soluble iron is a vital nutrient in marine ecosystems because most phytoplankton—the foundation of marine food webs—depend on it to grow. 

The glacial ice visible in these scenes comes from the Agassiz Ice Cap, one of five major ice caps on Ellesmere Island. Using data from NASA’s ICESat and the DLR-NASA GRACE missions, scientists have shown that glaciers in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago began shrinking rapidly in the mid-2000s and that the trend has persisted.

NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Kathryn Hansen.

References & Resources

• Dmitrenko, I.A., et al. (2025) Following a half-century oceanographic data gap in the northern Canadian Arctic Archipelago: multidecadal variability of the Pacific water throughflow. Frontiers in Marine Science, 12, 1602485.
• Gardner, A.S., et al. (2011) Sharply increased mass loss from glaciers and ice caps in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Nature, 473, 357-360.
• Wouters, B., et al. (2019) Global Glacier Mass Loss During the GRACE Satellite Mission (2002-2016). Frontiers in Earth Science, 7, 96.

Patches of the Sun’s surface often show strong magnetic fields. These fields can emerge within a matter of hours, and can decay slowly or quickly, sometimes over days, weeks, or even months. Thanks to a new study about these long-lived active regions, we now know much more about the patches where these strong magnetic fields take at least a month to decay.

This study relied on inputs from NASA’s Solar Active Region Spotter citizen science project, which asked volunteers to answer a series of questions about pairs of active region images from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory.

Project leads Emily Mason (Predictive Science Inc.) and Kara Kniezewski (Air Force Institute of Technology) looked at the data and the analysis done by volunteers. They found that the long-lived active regions produce disproportionately more flares than the shorter-lived regions and are 3-6 times more likely than other active regions to be the source of the most intense kinds of solar flares. These results are a strong indication that long-lived active regions are crucial for predicting space weather and could provide critical information on magnetic fields deeper inside the Sun. 

The Solar Active Region Spotter project is now complete, but you can learn more about the results here: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/eimason/solar-active-region-spotter/about/results

Explore NASA Citizen Science projects you can join today to help advance our understanding of space weather: https://go.nasa.gov/3ZK6nvE.

The Daily Minor Planet citizen science project is expanding! In addition to data received nightly from the Catalina Sky Survey’s Mt. Lemmon telescope in Arizona, the project’s science team is now processing images from the Bok 2.3-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory. The Bok is a mighty telescope run by the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory that is used to survey for new near-Earth objects (NEOs) – asteroids that cross Earth’s orbit.

Data from the Bok telescope peers deeper than the data from the Mt. Lemmon telescope–it reveals objects roughly two to three times as faint. Software often struggles with such faint objects, but humans shine at pattern recognition in this kind of data, making your contributions to this search more valuable than ever. 

Another important feature of the new data is that it mostly comes from the ecliptic, the band of sky where asteroids and comets preferentially travel. The project team expects this deeper, ecliptic-focused coverage to substantially increase the number of main-belt asteroids they can recover and confirm and bring fresh waves of near-Earth asteroid candidates. 

Keep an eye out for new Bok subject sets as they are added. They’ll be a little more challenging and a lot more rewarding!

The Daily Minor Planet is a regularly updated citizen science project hosted by the Zooniverse using nightly data collected by the Catalina Sky Survey. Anyone with a laptop or smartphone can join.

NASA has selected eight student teams as finalists in the 2026 Gateways to Blue Skies Competition, giving them the resources to help address a critical challenge for U.S. aviation: maintenance. 

Challenges facing the commercial aviation industry include a shortage of qualified maintenance workers and increasing demands to keep complicated aircraft running for longer. With Gateways to Blue Skies, NASA taps into student innovation to address some of the biggest topics in aviation, and the current competition, RepAir: Advancing Aircraft Maintenance, is looking for solutions that can have immediate impact. 

“Through this competition, students will learn about aviation maintenance and be empowered to change its future,” said Steven Holz, associate project manager for NASA’s University Innovation Project and judging panel co-chair for Gateways to Blue Skies. “By grounding innovative ideas in real operational needs and presenting them to NASA and industry experts, these teams demonstrate the kind of critical thinking, collaboration, and forward-looking problem solving that will shape a safer, more efficient aviation industry in the near future.” 

This competition challenged teams of postsecondary students to conceptualize innovative systems and practices that could advance current commercial aircraft maintenance and repair operations. It addresses dual goals for NASA: supporting innovative research and also stimulating the potential aviation workforce of tomorrow. 

The goal for RepAir: Advancing Aircraft Maintenance is to generate concepts to improve efficiency, safety, and costs for the aviation maintenance industry by 2035. That timeline differs from many NASA research competitions focused on long-term future technologies; RepAir seeks to address the maintenance issues of today. 

NASA made its selections based on a review of participants’ proposals and accompanying videos summarizing the RepAir concepts. The eight finalist teams will receive a $9,000 prize and will advance to Phase 2 of the competition.  

Phase 2 includes a review of each team’s final paper, infographic, and presentation at the 2026 Gateways to Blue Skies Forum, held May 18 at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia in May and livestreamed globally. Following the forum, members of the winning team who fulfill eligibility criteria will be offered the opportunity to intern with NASA Aeronautics.   

The 2026 Gateways to Blue Skies Competition finalist projects represent an array of capabilities including robotic inspections, augmented reality smart glasses, and sensor and machine learning architectures: 

• Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Daytona Beach with Cecil College Maryland 
  Advancing Aircraft Maintenance, Smart Mechanic Glasses 
• Manhattan University  
  Aircraft Enhanced Resilience and Intelligence Systems (A.E.R.I.S) 
• Michigan State University  
  Surface Evaluation Network for Tethered Inspection and Nondestructive Evaluation (SENTINEL) 
• South Dakota State University  
  Surveying Platform and Inspection Device for Enclosed Regions (S.P.I.D.E.R.) 
• South Dakota State University  
  WINGMAN, augmented reality data-logging and information-display system for improved efficiency in line maintenance inspections and reporting 

• South Dakota State University  
  Surface Preservation and Rust Killer (S.P.A.R.K.) Crawler 

• University of California, Irvine  
  Aircraft Structural Health Intelligence for Evaluation and Lifecycle Detection (Air SHIELD) 
• University of Maryland Eastern Shore 
  A Self-Supervised Learning Framework for Auxiliary Power Unit (APU) Fuel Control Unit Health Management in Aircraft known as APU Sentinel 

The Gateways to Blue Skies Challenge is led through the Transformative Aeronautics Concepts Program in NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate. The NASA Tournament Lab, part of the Prizes, Challenges, and Crowdsourcing Program in the Space Technology Mission Directorate, manages the challenge through the National Institute of Aerospace on behalf of NASA. 

More on the Gateways to Blues Skies: RepAir: Advancing Aircraft Maintenance competition is available on the competition’s site. 

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