Generic Adaptive Approaches for Orbit and Attitude Determination on Earth Pointing Spacecraft

In Phase II, the Microcosm team proposes to build on the Phase I concept of creating a plug-and-play (PnP) attitude/orbit determination and control system (AODCS) that facilitates both rapid integration and on-board discovery, by adding autonomous AODCS planning, trajectory optimization features, and other upgrades. These features will be implemented as part of the AODCS flight software, through the AODCS subsystem controller interface, as well as through a stand-alone service within the PnP architecture. The planning functions within the AODCS subsystem controller will be enhanced to include autonomous orbit maintenance, resulting in a determination of the resources necessary to achieve a specified desired state. The autonomous planning service will allow the spacecraft, through the various activity agents and managers, to query for information about the spacecraft current state, its propagated state, and its optimized trajectory, taking into account various keep-out zones for payloads and other on-board instruments. The output of the autonomous planning service will be simple, discrete steps that are input to the AODCS subsystem controller. It is through these on-board planning tools that true operationally responsive space can be achieved with the rapid integration of existing flight software components and through the exploitation of on-board autonomous functions.