The Adaptive Network Architecture for Formations of Heterogeneous Spacecraft

Many future earth and space science missions, such as the Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission and Terrestrial Planet Finder, have been proposed that require a high level of coordination between multiple heterogeneous sensors and spacecraft to achieve their mission objectives. On-board autonomy and distributed processing are additional key technologies that can improve the fidelity and quality of the missions' data products while reducing the associated ground support. This paper will present the development of an agentbased software architecture for real-time embedded systems that provides a flexible, reconfigurable framework to support