Towards Robust, Resilient Ocean World Science Sampling Systems

NASA’s search for life and habitable regions in our solar system will likely lead to future landed missions on Europa and Enceladus, whose ocean worlds may support life. However, these destinations pose significant operational challenges – distance makes for a long communications lag, the lifetime of landed assets will be limited by radiation damage and hostile conditions, and have finite power. These conditions demand a high degree of autonomy in order to carry out the excavation, collection, and transfer of samples to in-situ scientific instruments, and to communicate results back to Earth. Our Robust, Explainable Autonomy for Scientific Icy Moon Operations (REASIMO) effort aims to improve the science yield and robustness of these kinds of missions by increasing the level of flight-qualifiable autonomy that can be applied to such operations. This is to be achieved by recognizing and , where possible, handling anomalies in situ, whether caused by faults, degradations, failures, or other unexpected conditions.

NASA在太阳系中寻找生命与宜居区域的探索，或将促成未来在木卫二（Europa）和土卫二（Enceladus）的着陆任务——这两颗海洋世界可能具备生命支持条件。然而，这些目的地带来了重大的操作挑战：距离导致通信延迟过长，着陆设备（landed assets）的寿命受限于辐射损伤（radiation damage）与恶劣环境（hostile conditions），且功率有限。这些条件要求系统具备高度自主性（autonomy），以执行样本的挖掘、采集与转运至原位科学仪器（in-situ scientific instruments），并将结果传回地球。我们的“科学冰月任务鲁棒、可解释自主性”（Robust, Explainable Autonomy for Scientific Icy Moon Operations，REASIMO）项目旨在通过提升可应用于此类任务的飞行级合格自主性（flight-qualifiable autonomy）水平，提高这类任务的科学产出与鲁棒性。这将通过识别并在可能情况下原位处理异常（anomalies）来实现，无论这些异常由故障（faults）、性能退化（degradations）、失效（failures）或其他意外情况引发。