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A good deal of effort was required for the flight testing program to take place from the initial planning stages through the development of the detailed tests and crew training to the actual flight and post-flight analysis. The following provides an overview of the flight testing program.

3.1 FLIGHT PLANNING

SRMS on-orbit tests were the result of a complex and iterative process of planning. Basic tests were first outlined to address the issues of the SRMS performance and verification and to provide data for the SRMS model validation, while maintaining the safety of the SRMS/Orbiter and its crew. Based on these general objectives, detailed tests were then defined. The detailed test plans specify SRMS operating modes, initial arm configurations, SRMS commands and command durations, payload, Orbiter Reaction Control System (RCS) configuration and Orbiter inertial attitude (for thermal testing). Pre-mission simulations were then conducted using real-time simulations to determine the feasibility of the tests in terms of time lines, crew workload, malfunction effects and collisions. In addition, tests were also conducted using higher fidelity non-real time simulations to determine the feasibility of the tests in terms of SRMS loads so that the structural integrity of the SRMS can be maintained, and SRMS/Orbiter configurations and control activities so that meaningful flight data can be obtained. If necessary the test conditions would be altered and the iterative process would then start until satisfactory simulation results were achieved. Often the participation and contribution by the crew throughout the flight planning process proved to be invaluable. The final step was to provide all the detailed crew tasks in an SRMS operations checklist.

Since the SRMS testing was only a subset of the overall Orbiter testing, the SRMS tests had to be integrated  into the overall mission timeline via Crew Activity Plan (CAP).

3.2 FLIGHT TESTS

The on-orbit SRMS tests can be categorized into two groups. The first group consists of the normal operations of the SRMS with payloads of different mass properties. The corresponding flight data is used to measure the on-orbit performance of the Orbiter/SRMS integrated system. This provides the basis for the performance verification of the SRMS (e.g., the SRMS performance in different operating modes with different payloads, the SRMS handling qualities, the hardware/software integrated performance, payload berthing and the unberthing into and out of retention latches in the Orbiter cargo bay, and payload deployment and retrieval operations). The second group is specifically designed for SRMS simulation model validation (see Table 3-2) and parameter estimation.


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