Low Cost, Tailor able Avionics for Rapid Response Satellites

Addressing the needs of the Responsive Space initiative requires a seamless integrated tool capability, particularly when applied to meet the most challenging case of the “six day satellite” concept, where mission objectives are reduced to a satellite configuration and the spacecraft is assembled, tested and flown within a week. DNet has developed several of the tools that support this design chain and installed them at the Responsive Space Testbed in Albuquerque. One of these tools is the Space Mission Solver. The Solver uses a rules-based approach to satisfy (if possible) a requested functionality using all variables in the design-space. It also has the ability to draw from a knowledge base of previously assessed cases to find spacecraft configurations that are most suitable for a mission based on Measures of Effectiveness (MOEs). To provide the most capable satellite candidates, the knowledge base must be populated with data derived from high-fidelity design tools or “wizards”. We propose to define these wizards for each spacecraft engineering discipline in Phase II efforts and extend the design space to accommodate some of that capability. We will accomplish this by identifying domain experts to assist in defining the functionality that best supports a long-range Testbed vision.