Autonomous Onboard Health Management for Small Spacecraft and Distributed Systems

As small spacecraft swarms proliferate in Earth, Moon, and someday Martian orbits, we will need automated tools to ensure their safety and operations. Orbital conjunctions, communications latency and bandwidth limitations are all challenges for safe future growth, and all depend in part on spacecraft health. On Earth, commercial industries have evolved an ecosystem of sensors, enabling Automation and Artificial Intelligence technologies for predictive maintenance, autonomous diagnostics, and autonomous repair of industrial systems and mobile platforms. Opportunities to explore these industry capabilities on orbit are rare, despite an increasing need to automate spacecraft processes as swarms and constellations proliferate. SmallSats represent both technology demonstration platforms for these technologies, as well as potential end-users. This SBIR opportunity is intended to spur the exploration of autonomous capabilities focused on health of individual small spacecraft and distributed swarms. We are looking for continuous on-board health management capabilities using sensors and software to 1) detect anomalies, 2) diagnose, isolate or localize faults, 3) reduce time to effect and impact estimation, and 4) autonomous safing, mitigation, recovery and/or repair. We also encourage the use of these on-board capabilities to maintain the performance of swarms when component spacecraft experience faults or are in recovery . We are particularly interested in capabilities to: Inform successful response to unknown faults faults not a-priori envisioned or defined during design where as many as 40% of failure modes may go unidentified through Key Decision Point to Phase E (KDP E, the critical milestone for transitioning to operations). Effective and timely response of these is essential for mission success. Maintain system health in the face of environmental variability (such as changing illumination, radiation, or aerodynamic pressure), or degradation of onboard subsystems beyond the expected operating envelopes they may have been designed for and/or trained on. Such abilities are considered enabling in achieving fully autonomous spacecraft navigation and operations.