Autonomous Spacecraft Power Scheduling

The Autonomous Power Scheduler (APS) being developed by AeroAstro and Los Alamos National Laboratory will significantly improve the performance of small spacecraft power management, resulting in better utilization of the limited power resources for their payloads and subsystems. APS will dynamically monitor microsatellite power resources and then, by adaptively modifying the algorithmic solution applied by spacecraft systems, it will intelligently and autonomously schedule and distribute available power resources to the processing-intensive payloads and other spacecraft subsystems. Due to existing power management paradigms, small spacecraft are prohibited from hosting advanced processing-intensive payloads. However, to maintain cost-effective and useful access to space, the future of small spacecraft will be to accomplish more intensive onboard processing. APS will improve the orbital power efficiency of small spacecraft, especially those with processing-intensive payloads, by as much as 10% for an investment measured in hundreds of thousands of dollars. The overarching goal of proposed Phase II effort is to demonstrate and characterize the performance that can be achieved through implementation of the APS technology in future small satellite systems. The Phase II effort is focused on integration and testing of the APS technology on a hardware testbed that is representative of a spacecraft platform.