Unleashing Robust, Explainable Autonomy in Icy Moon Missions: Testbed Demonstrations

Our Robust, Explainable Autonomy for Scientific Icy Moon Operations (REASIMO) effort contributes to NASA’s COLDTech program, which explores science platform technologies for icy worlds such as Europa and Enceladus. Icy world missions pose significant operational challenges – long communications lags, limited power, and lifetime limitations caused by radiation damage and hostile conditions. Onboard autonomy will be vital for future missions operating under these constraints. Our effort focuses on advancing autonomous behaviors for robotic sampling systems that collect and transfer material samples to in-situ scientific instruments and communicate results back to Earth – all in environments whose conditions are poorly understood in advance. Autonomy would be critical in the event of anomalies (faults or unanticipated circumstances), which at present are largely handled by Earth-based mission operators to diagnose the situation and direct recovery. Such operations would drastically reduce the science effectiveness of a time-limited mission. REASIMO aims to demonstrate a flight-qualifiable level of autonomy for such missions, including the ability to detect and recover from anomalies autonomously.