Availability estimation for facilities in extreme geographical locations

A value added analysis for the Reliability, Availability and Maintainability of McMurdo Ground Station was developed, which will be a useful tool for system managers in sparing, maintenance planning and determining vital performance metrics needed for readiness assessment of the up grades to the McMurdo System. Output of this study can also be used as inputs and recommendations for the application of Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) for the system. ReliaSoft´s BlockSim [1], a commercial Reliability Analysis software package, has been used to model the availability of the system upgrade to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Near Earth Network (NEN) Ground Station at McMurdo Station [2] in the Antarctica. The logistics challenges due to the closure of access to McMurdo Station during the Antarctic winter was modeled using a weighted composite of four Weibull distributions, one of the possible choices for statistical distributions throughout the software program and usually used to account for failure rates of components supplied by different manufacturers. The inaccessibility of the antenna site on a hill outside McMurdo Station throughout one year due to severe weather was modeled with a Weibull distribution for the repair crew availability. The Weibull distribution is based on an analysis of the available weather data for the antenna site for 2007 in combination with the rules for travel restrictions due to severe weather imposed by the administrating agency, the National Science Foundation (NSF). The simulations resulted in an upper bound for the system availability and allowed for identification of components that would improve availability based on a higher on-site spare count than initially planned.