Environment induced anomalies on the TDRS and the role of spacecraft charging

The NASA Tracking and Data Relay Satellites (TDRS) have experienced several classes of anomalies that appear to be related to the natural environment. The most serious of these have been anomalies in the Attitude Control System control processor electronics which resulted in check sum errors that were ultimately traced to high-energy, particle-induced single event upsets in the RAM memory. Three other types of anomalies on TDRS have also been correlated with environmental effects. This paper briefly documents the occurrences of these anomalies and describes the nature of each. These events are correlated with various environmental factors. For all cases, there appears to be a causal relationship between spacecraft charging events and the engineering anomalies.