A Knowledge Engineering Framework for Mission Operations of Increasingly Autonomous Spacecraft

As planning and autonomy in general become increasingly deployed onboard spacecraft, missions will face a paradigm shift in how ground operations teams command and interact with the spacecraft: moving from specifying timed sequences of commands to high level goals that on-board autonomy will elaborate based on the spacecraft’s state and sensed environment. In this paper we present an ongoing effort to develop an integrated framework for supporting ground operations through modeling science and engineering intent/goals, predicting outcomes, assessing spacecraft state and performance, and maintaining models used for on-board decision-making and ground-based monitoring. Specifically, we describe the specific knowledge engineering aspects that are key in the operations of autonomous spacecraft, and how we propose to addressed the challenges posed by operations of on-board autonomy.