Developing autonomous missions through intelligent on-board architectures

As NASA visualizes the future of space exploration, they will encounter a number of challenges during the development of new missions whose goals are to return man to the Moon and explore Mars and other planets. While NASA has been extremely successful with manned flight, continuous exploration of deep space holds it own unique challenges like large latencies, high bit error rates, and sparse and infrequent communications opportunities. To overcome these challenges, NASA must develop intelligent and extensible on-board architectures that can result in autonomous missions for deep space exploration. These missions, whether manned or unmanned, must provide self-management and- self-healing services to achieve mission success. The goal of this paper is to develop and explain an intelligent and extensible on-board satellite architecture that can be reconfigured to meet the requirements of many missions. This architecture is compared and contrasted with existing on-board architectures that are currently considered the state-of-the-art. Finally, the required steps need to take these architectures from concept to implementation are discussed.