The Emergence of S

The challenge of space flight in NASA’s future is to enable more frequent and more intensive space exploration missions at lower cost. Nowhere is this challenge more acute than among the planetary exploration missions which JPL conducts for NASA. The launching of a new era of solar system exploration -beyond reconnaissance -is being designed for the first time around the concept of sustained intelligent presence on the space platforms themselves. Artificial intelligence, spacecraft engineering, mission design, software engineering and systems engineering all have a role to play in this vision, and all are being integrated in new work on spacecraft autonomy. The Strategic Importance of Spacecraft Autonomy The development of autonomy technologies is the key to three vastly important strategic technical challenges facing JPL: the reduction of mission costs, the continuing return of quality science products through limited communications bandwidth, and the launching of a new era of solar system exploration -beyond reconnaissance characterized by sustained presence and in-depth scientific studies. Autonomy can reduce mission costs in multiple ways: 1) by migrating routine, traditionally ground-based functions to the spacecraft (e.g., resource management, engineering data analysis, navigation), 2) by directly supporting the decoupling of space platforms from the ground through new operations concepts, 3) by supporting direct links between scientists and the space platforms carrying their instruments of investigation, and 4), via the closing of planning and control loops onboard, enabling the space platform to directly address uncertainty in the real-time mission context and obviating the need for many intense, indirect and inefficient interactions with the ground which occur in today ‘s missions by default. Recent estimates for expected cost savings in the operation of future JPL missions using autonomy 756 INVITED TALKS capabilities run as high as 60%. The same study concluded uplink (commanding) savings alone could be as great as $14M/year for orbiter-type mapping missions (e.g., Magellan), and $30M/year for multiple-flyby tourtype missions (e.g., Galileo). (Ridenoure 1995). Autonomy technology for onboard science data processing, along with advances in telecommunications technology, can address the challenge of limited communications bandwidth, which may worsen if NASA’s vision of flying more space platforms at once is realized. Through onboard decision-making, scientisttrained recognizers, and judicious use of knowledge discovery methods, a portion of the scientist’s awareness can be projected to the space platform, providing the basis for scientist-directed downlink prioritization and the processing of raw instrument data into science information products. This software-based partnership between scientist and space platform can evolve during the mission as the scientist becomes increasingly comfortable with the direct relationship with the space platform, intermediate scientific results emerge, and scientist-directed software updates are uploaded. Finally, autonomy is the central capability for enabling long-term scientific studies of a decade or more, currently prohibited by cost and self-reliance of space platforms, and for enabling new classes of missions which inherently must be executed without the benefit of ground support, either due to control challenges, e.g., small body rendezvous and landing missions, or due to planning challenges which arise from of the impossibility of communication for long periods, e.g., a Europan under-ice explorer, or a Titan aerobot. The need for autonomy technology is nowhere greater than in the set of deep space planetary missions which JPL conducts for NASA. The extreme remoteness of the targets, the impossibility of hands-on troubleshooting or maintenance, and the difficulties of light-time delayed communication (four hours and greater round-trip in the outer solar system) all contribute to make JPL science missions the focus for the development and application of autonomy technology. From: AAAI-97 Proceedings. Copyright © 1997, AAAI (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.