Autonomous spacecraft will require detailed knowledge of its mission, its status, and its environment, and highly reliable software for handling anomalous and fault conditions. The Essential Services Node (ESN) provides a hardware interface to the increasing number of spacecraft sensors that will be required for autonomous operation. The spacecraft data bus, heavily burdened with science data, will limit the ability of the spacecraft to function autonomously. We propose ESN-embedded expert system firmware that will vastly increase the rate of information transfer to the host, by real-time optimization of data content, and which will also eliminate custom programming of the host computer for new sensors. The increased efficiency of spacecraft bus use will not only provide the rate of information transfer needed for the autonomous spacecraft, but will reduce preflight contention for bus time allocations, and expedite system and subsystem test and integration. We will confirm in this Phase I SBIR that this technique will yield an order of magnitude increase in the engineering data bus efficiency . This architecture will provide the spacecraft health monitoring performance needed for the autonomous spacecraft, and will yield cost reductions essential for NASA and commercial spacecraft.
Potential Commercial Applications:Substantial commercial potential exists for products that implement this architecture. Daedalian System Corporation has been in contact with major aerospace companies that have expressed serious interest in this product for application in commercial satellites and commercial launch vehicles. NASA missions like MIDEX could benefit from this product.
