Autonomous Mission Management for Satellite Systems

Satellite intelligence information is being used increasingly for real-time operations.  This requires satellites that can be quickly tasked for new objectives and that can respond to opportunistic situations.  Unfortunately, today''''s satellites rely on ground operators to control them.  This means there is a large delay between when a new task is requested or a new threat identified and the response by the satellite.  The usefulness of satellites and satellite information would be increased if the satellites could respond quickly and effectively with limited ground operator interaction.  In addition, because satellites are increasingly important to modern warfare they also face increasing threats from anti-satellite weapons (ASATs).  Thus, they need a means to effectively and autonomously respond to these threats.  This proposal offers an integrated architecture for autonomously managing satellite missions.  It combines state-of-the-art planning with open source NASA execution technology and NASA-developed event detection and assessment software. These are integrated to create a responsive, autonomous mission manager for space systems. BENEFIT: Autonomous systems are becoming increasingly prevalent in military and civilian applications.  While the system described in this proposal will be targeted towards military satellite systems, similar technology could also be applied to UAVs, UGVs, robots, space vehicles, commercial satellites, computer security, process automation and intelligent vehicles.  This creates a large number of commercial applications for technology developed under this research.