Reliability evaluation of communication satellite thruster

A reliability evaluation and life prediction method on communication satellite thruster was established for its characters of long life, high manufacturing cost and experimental expense, and most of the obtained data are zero-failure data or very few failure data. For the difficulty to evaluate the reliability of satellite thrusters, a converting principle of information among different test conditions was provided, and successfully solved this problem. Based on these approaches, the reliability of communication satellite thruster can be evaluated with high precision. Data from impulse test and steady test of a thruster were analyzed, and the reliability evaluation for its geostationary orbit and transfer orbit were derived.