Imagine what a mission could accomplish if it were possible to put the combined expertise of the science and operations teams onboard a spacecraft. It could detect events and then use that information to determine its next actions in real time without input from humans. Event-driven autonomous operations will be key to a new class of missions that could accomplish amazing things—from traversing subterranean caves on Mars, to unlocking the secrets of turbulence in the solar wind, to exploring under the ice of Europa.
Mission operations engineers face the daunting tasks of maintaining the health and functionality of a spacecraft and its payload, capturing high-value data, and responding to a dynamically evolving environment. They must plan activities days or weeks into the future using very limited information. These tasks become even more complicated when one factors in the lengthy time between spacecraft contacts, the light-time delay of bidirectional communications, the transient nature of ephemeral science targets, and the prospect of multiple spacecraft operating simultaneously.
In an effort sponsored by the Space Technology Mission Directorate’s Small Business Innovation Research/Small Business Tech Transfer (SBIR/STTR) program, Aurora Engineering has developed an onboard autonomous operations agent that can help mitigate these challenges. Rather than a ground team planning spacecraft activitie …