Development of an Autonomous Distributed Fault Management Architecture for the VISORS Mission
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Paletta, Antoine
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Abstract
CubeSat formations have been identified as a new paradigm for addressing important
science questions, but are often early adopters of new technologies which carry additional
risks. When these missions involve proximity operations, novel fault management
architectures are needed to handle these risks. Building on established methods, this paper
presents one such architecture that involves a passively safe relative orbit design,
interchangeable chief-deputy roles, a formation level fault diagnosis scheme, and an
autonomous multi-agent fault handling approach. This architecture focuses on detecting
faults occurring on any member of a spacecraft formation in real time and performing
autonomous decision making to resolve them and keep the formation safe from an inter satellite collision. The NSF-sponsored Virtual Super-resolution Optics with Reconfigurable
Swarms (VISORS) mission, which consists of two 6U CubeSats flying in formation 40 meters
apart as a distributed telescope to study the solar corona, is used as a case study for the
application of this architecture. The underlying fault analysis, formulation of key elements of
the fault detection and response strategy, and the implementation as flight software for
VISORS are discussed in the paper.
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Date
2023-05-01
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Text
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Masters Project
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