DSM Autonomy System

Increasing the level of spacecraft autonomy for any future space mission will make it more affordable and capable, allowing NASA to do more science with less operations costs. For future Distributed Space Missions (DSMs) however, spacecraft autonomy is critical to reducing costs to make the missions affordable and practical. The use of multiple satellites to simultaneously sample science observations in multiple spatial, spectral, angular, and temporal dimensions is feasible only if the mission operations costs do not scale up with the number of vehicles in the constellation. Accordingly, flight software technology that enables safe, cost-efficient on-board operation of satellite constellations is required. In Phase I of this project, Emergent Space Technologies, Inc. (Emergent) focused on the development of a highly capable executive for automating on-board satellite operations and coordinating operations between DSM satellites. Called Distributed Automation Suite for Heuristic Execution and Response (DASHER), the executive is compatible with NASA’s core Flight Software (cFS) suite to leverage existing flight software technology that has been proven on missions such as LRO, MMS and GPM and extend it to DSMs. In Phase I, we successfully demonstrated an autonomous Executive. In Phase II, we extend the executive function to provide a full cFS-based DSM autonomy framework that includes multiple planning agents, scheduling at the DSM level and at the satellite level, and fault detection, isolation, and recovery (FDIR). DSMs using this framework will be able to autonomously plan, schedule, and execute activities using shared resources. We demonstrate the technology in a realistic hardware-in-the-loop simulation for conceptual DSM missions targeted at Earth remote sensing.