Description:
Lead Center:ARC
Participating Center(s):JSC,JPL
Future human spaceflight missions will place crews at large distances and light-time delays from Earth, requiring novel capabilities for crews and ground to manage spacecraft consumables such as power, water, propellant and life support systems to prevent Loss of Mission (LOM) or Loss of Crew (LOC). This capability is necessary to handle events such as leaks or failures leading to unexpected expenditure of consumables coupled with lack of communications. If crews in the spacecraft must manage, plan and operate much of the mission themselves, NASA must migrate operations functionality from the flight control room to the vehicle for use by the crew. Migrating flight controller tools and procedures to the crew on-board the spacecraft would, even if technically possible, overburden the crew. Enabling these same monitoring, tracking, and management capabilities on-board the spacecraft for a small crew to use will require significant automation and decision support software. Required capabilities to enable future human spaceflight to distant destinations include: Enable on-board crew management of vehicle consumables that are currently flight controller responsibilities. Increase the onboard capability to detect and respond to unexpected consumables-management related events and faults without dependence on ground. Reduce up-front and recurring software costs to produce flight-critical software. Provide more efficient and cost effective ground based operations through automation of consumables management processes, and up-front and recurring mission operations software costs. The same capabilities for enabling human spaceflight missions are directly applicable to efforts to automate the operation of unmanned aircraft flying in the National Airspace (NAS) and robotic planetary explorers. Mission Operations Automation: Peer-to-peer mission operations planning. Mixed initiative planning systems. Elicitation of mission planning constraints and preferences. Planning system software integration. Space Vehicle Automation: Autonomous rendezvous and docking software. Integrated discrete and continuous control software. Long-duration high-reliability autonomous system. Power aware computing. Spacecraft Systems Automation: Mutli-agent autonomous systems for mapping. Safe proximity operations (including astronauts). Uncertainty management for proximity ops, movement, etc. Emphasis of proposed efforts: Software proposals only, but emphasize hardware and operating systems the proposed software will run on (e.g., processors, sensors). In-space or Terrestrial applications (e.g., UAV mission management) are acceptable. Proposals must demonstrate mission operations cost reduction by use of standards, open source software, staff reduction, and/or decrease of software integration costs. Proposals must demonstrate autonomy software cost reduction by use of standards, demonstration of capability especially on long-duration missions, system integration, and/or use of open source software. Proposals will mature technology from TRL 4 to TRL 5 or 6 by the end of Phase II work. Phase I proposals must demonstrate the viability of the maturation. Proposal deliverables must include: Software (source code, build instructions, and dependencies are ideal, but binaries may be acceptable under some circumstances). Software interface description documents, software architecture descriptions, and other documentation. Demonstrations of software systems on relevant applications. Quantification of software performance on relevant problems, documented in a report.
