NASA Logo, National Aeronautics and Space Administration

DS1 Remote Agent Experiment

Deep Space One (DS1) is the first spacecraft to be launched as a part of NASA's New Millenium Program. DS1 will being flying by and photographing an asteroid and a comet, but it is, for the most part, a technology validation mission. As a result of its stellar perfomance on the NewMaap Simulation, Remote Agent was chosen as one of the new technologies to be tested on this mission. The test is called the Remote Agent Experiment (RAX).

Abilites Remote Agent Will Demonstrate During RAX

  • Planner/Scheduler (PS) will generate plans to achieve general mission goals.
  • Smart Executive (EXEC) will effectively execute the plans by sending commands to spacecraft components.
  • Mode Indentification and Recovery (MIR) will detect and isolate failures and initiate recovery actions when necessary.
  • PS will generate new effective plans if necessary after failure detection, based on the new status of the spacecraft.

RAX consists of two separate stages, Phase One and Phase Two. Phase One will last two days, and Phase Two will last 12 minutes.

Phase One Tasks

  • PS will generate two plans, each lasting approximately one day sequences to achieve mission goals such as imaging for optical navigation and Solar Electric Propulsion thrusting in order to stay on course.
  • EXEC will command spacecraft components to carry out the plan sequences.
  • MIR will monitor the actions of the spacecraft components and will detect an injected failure, the camera is stuck on. EXEC will abort the plan and request the PS to generate a new plan based on the current status of the spacecraft.
  • MIR will detect and isolate a second injected failure, failure of a hardware device, and will recover by suggesting that EXEC reset the device.
  • MIR will detect a third injected failure, a thruster stuck closed, and will recover by suggesting that EXEC use an alternative method of attitude control.

Phase Two Tasks

  • Ground controllers will send DS1 a plan to go into standby mode and then to take a series of optical navigation images. EXEC will carry out the plans by sending commands to the appropriate spacecraft systems.
  • MIR will detect a failure, a power bus switch unexpectedly off, which was injected into the software by ground controllers. MIR will diagnose the failure as the sensor giving an inaccurate reading and therefore no recovery action will take place. EXEC will continue with the current plan.

If Remote Agent successfully performs the tasks in RAX, it will pave the way for this new technology to control future missions; missions that would otherwise be impossible.

First Gov logo
NASA Logo - nasa.gov