Mission Autonomy

Autonomous Navigation

One-way Doppler Navigation
Establish the precision of spacecraft orbit determination based on one-way Doppler measurements.

Autonomous Interplanetary Navigation
Develop a self-contained autonomous navigation system for interplanetary missions.

Autonomous Onboard Sub-Object Tracking
Incorporate the ability to process images onboard the spacecraft to autonomously acquire and track unresolved point-source objects such as asteroid sub-satellites or cometary fragments.

Autonomy Architecture

Safing Architecture
The APL Integrated Electronics Module (IEM) intends to dramatically change the way engineers design, integrate, test and operate standard data handling, attitude control, and safing functions on satellites. The inclusion of a separate hardware platform dedicated solely to system safing provides the ultimate “fall-back” protection for very complicated systems. The introduction of a reliable, high performance hardware architecture for space satellites is not complete without an equivalent set of driving software. APL proposes to compliment the hardware approach with an equally reliable suite of software components and drivers specifically suited for the IEM.

MDS_LITE Software Architecture
JPL is developing a unified ground and flight software architecture that they intend to use for future space missions called the Mission Data System (MDS). The architecture includes command & data handling, attitude control, navigation, fault recovery, autonomy, and operations. Based on the same founding concepts, APL proposes to develop a “lightweight” version of MDS specifically designed towards small satellite and constellation use. MDS, as it exists today, targets planetary-scale missions, and missions where instrumentation, spacecraft bus, and mission.

Man-Machine Interaction

A Rapid Application Development Environment for Analysis and Display of Spacecraft Data
Lower the cost and increase the effec-tiveness of providing spacecraft data to scientists, engineers, and students. access systems for test or operational data. In particular, we will give scientists the ability to interactively select data streams, choose and configure filters to be attached to the streams, choose and configure graphing and display objects to be attached to the results, and save the setup for later use, all without any explicit programming.

Human Interaction with Autonomous Spacecraft
A long-term goal of the project is to develop user-interface designs, information architectures, and software components that can support user’s interaction with autonomous spacecraft.