How Intelligent Asset Management Protects Tomorrow’s Space Technologies Today

Studies from Aviva suggest that the best age is 35 and in UnitedHealthcare’s survey of people over the age of 100, most respondents recalled their 30s as the best decade of their lives.

At the NASA Langley Research Center in Virginia however, the more than 43,000 assets in operation at the birthplace of America’s manned space program and home to the nation’s first astronaut corps, are an average of 30-years-old or more, many surpassing their original design life. When assets reach and exceed their useful lives, the risks to their data and to those interfacing with them increase, leaving both safety and investments up to chance.

But what if we showed you how NASA and Jacobs are using intelligent asset management technologies to optimize operations and increase the life of assets at NASA Langley?

Comprised of more than 780 acres, the NASA Langley campus is home to 270 facilities, 220 of which are classified as critical, such as subsonic-to-hypersonic wind tunnels used in aeronautic testing and engineering sensors that will measure the atmospheric conditions and heatshield performance during the Entry Descent and Landing phase of the Mars 2020 mission. Efforts at Langley focus on revolutionary improvements to aviation, expanding understanding of Earth’s atmosphere and developing technology for space exploration.

Driven by shrinking budgets, unplanned downtime, increased maintenance costs and a resource shortage, NASA partnered with Jacobs in 2013 to develop reliability-enhancing maintenance strategies for the Langley Research Center campus. Since coming online, Jacobs has developed a comprehensive strategic plan that includes condition-based management (CBM) asset prioritization; energy management (including SCADA); engineering and architecture of IT systems; sensors, tools and applications; campus-wide wireless network, including solar and micro-energy harvesting; and data storage optimized for the Langley environment.

We developed and operate a 24/7 Integrated Operations Center that provides command and control of f facility operations across more than 116,000 discrete data acquisition points, including temperature sensors, Building Automation System sensors, cameras, CO2 sensors, accelerometers and more.

Our cybersecurity experts ensured the safety and integrity of data transfer and capture and we linked floor plans using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and attached control drawings to facilitate troubleshooting and quickly identify problem areas. And, we introduced Building Automation, combining 11 disparate systems (primarily HVAC) into a single, integrated system.

In 2018, we signed a contract extension to continue providing facility-related intelligent asset management and operations and engineering support services at Langley throughout 2019, such as design engineering, project management, construction management, configuration management and asset management services for research facilities, wind tunnels, laboratories, test structures and specialty instrumentation.

By implementing our CBM approach, NASA Langley has realized substantially improved system reliability with the avoidance of $12 million in maintenance costs since implementation. Additionally, the campus has averted unplanned downtime on monitored assets for three years running.

NASA Langley Research Center’s asset management and reliability program is now touted as a possible enterprise solution for all of NASA and in 2017, UPTIME Magazine’s ReliabilityWeb® named the program Best Reliability Program of the Year.