Safe Agents in Space: Preventing and Responding to Anomalies in the Autonomous Sciencecraft Experiment

This paper describes the design of the Autonomous Sciencecraft Experiment, a software agent that has been running on-board the EO-1 spacecraft since 2003. The agent recognizes science events, retargets the spacecraft to respond to the science events, and reduces data downlink to only the highest value science data. The autonomous science agent was designed using a layered architectural approach with specific redundant safeguards to reduce the risk of an agent malfunction to the EO-1 spacecraft. The agent was designed to be “safe” by first preventing anomalies, then by automatically detecting and responding to them when possible. This paper describes elements of the design that increase the safety of the agent, several of the anomalies that occurred during the experiment, and how the agent responded to these anomalies.