D-HAMMER: Distributed Highly Autonomous Mission Manager for Event Response

ABSTRACT: SIFT proposes to design D-HAMMER a real-time autonomous on-board constraint- and model-based planning system to meet the challenges of fielding responsive, survivable, and cost-effective on-board autonomy for Air Force satellites. D-HAMMER is a three layer on-board autonomy architecture that combines a high-level mission planner and coordination system, a threat response planner, and a system executive to autonomously coordinate, plan, execute, and reactively replan the coordinated operations of teams of spacecraft. D-HAMMER will build on the flight heritage of the NASA JPL CASPER mission planner used on EO-1, combined with SIFT"s CIRCA threat response planner to reason proactively about hazards and adversaries. The resulting coordinated plans will be executed by a flight-ready executive such as the NASA Universal Executive or SRA"s Spacecraft Command Language Run-Time Executive. BENEFIT: D-HAMMER will dramatically improve the effectiveness and survivability of military satellites through the following specific improvements to the state of the art (1) automated on-orbit checkout, (2) coordinated multi-satellite autonomy, (3) rapid, distributed threat response, and (4) realistic path to flight experimentation.