Infusion of autonomy technology into space missions: DS1 lessons learned

The impact of infusing breakthrough autonomy technology into a flight project was a big surprise. Valuable technical and cultural lessons, many of general applicability when introducing system-level autonomy, have been learned by infusing the Remote Agent (RA) into NASA´s Deep Space 1 (DS1) spacecraft. The RA´s architecture embodies system-level autonomy in three major components: planning and scheduling, execution, and fault diagnosis and reconfiguration. Lessons learned include: the architecture was confirmed; active participation by nonautonomy personnel in the development is essential; communication of new concepts is essential, difficult, and hampered by differences in terminology; giving a spacecraft system-level autonomy changes organizational roles in operating the spacecraft after launch, and hence changes roles during development; software models supporting functions traditionally handled on the ground must be developed early enough to get on-board; shortfalls in planned features must be technically and developmentally accomodatable, in particular not to threaten the launch schedule; traditional commanding must be supported; testing must be emphasized. These lessons and others, on incremental system releases and use of autocode generation, are based on 16 months of spiral development from start of project through the project´s decision to reduce the role of the RA from full-time control of the spacecraft to a separable experiment