The Spacecraft Structural Health Monitoring experiment began development in 20132014 for integration onto two separate flight experiments. Last year’s publication focused on the development and preliminary testing for setting operational and science objective. This year the hardware has been integrated and ground measurements on the STP-H5 payload have begun. The goal for this hardware is identify the capability of this type of technology to enable greater insight into the structural status of a critical system or component. Integration also allowed researchers to identify secondary challenges facing the transition of such technologies and initiate a series of lessons learned to be applied to the second payload starting later in 2015. Integrated hardware has been used to monitor the assembly of the spacecraft and capture the integration steps of additional payloads. This paper will showcase the results and approaches for going through integration and current capabilities of the experiment and the operational limitation given the equipment setup.

Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) technologies have been under development for decades as an enabler of condition based maintenance (CBM), with the goal of providing damage detection capabilities to facilitate remaining useful life estimates. The spacecraft industry has applied these tools to some manned systems as a way to detect potential risk factors early-on and alert personnel to repair. Satellites however, are not designed to consider maintenance, thus the motivation for SHM technologies on unmanned spacecraft are considerably different. Here, the focus is on providing greater insight into the state of the structure as it is built and flown to quickly diagnose any anomalies. This paper discusses an experiment being developed at the Air Force Research Laboratories utilizing commercially available SHM hardware. Technical challenges will be discussed along with details into the planned experimental campaign.