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At least 127 records · Page 7

Improving Spacecraft Data Visualization Using Splunk

EPOXI, like all spacecraft missions, receives large volumes of telemetry data from its spacecraft, DIF. It is extremely important for this data to be updated quickly and presented in a readable manner so that the flight team can monitor the status of the spacecraft. Existing DMD pages for monitoring spacecraft telemetry, while functional, are limited and do not take advantage of modern search technology. For instance, they only display current data points from instruments on the spacecraft and have limited graphing capabilities, making it difficult to see historical data. The DMD pages have fixed refresh rates so the team must often wait several minutes to see the most recent data, even after it is received on the ground. The pages are also rigid and require an investment of time and money to update. To more easily organize and visualize spacecraft telemetry, the EPOXI team has begun experimenting with Splunk, a commercially-available data mining system. Splunk can take data received from the spacecraft's different data channels, often in different formats, and index all the data into a common format. Splunk allows flight team members to search through the different data formats from a single interface and to filter results by time range and data field to make finding specific spacecraft events quick and easy. Furthermore, Splunk provides functions to create custom interfaces which help team members visualize the data in charts and graphs to show how the health of the spacecraft has changed over time.One of the goals of my internship with my mentor, Victor Hwang, was to develop new Splunk interfaces to replace the DMD pages and give the spacecraft team access to historical data and visualizations that were previously unavailable. The specific requirements of these pages are discussed in the next section.

spacecraft missions↗

Packet telemetry - A possible standard protocol for spacecraft data handling

Packetized telemetry-handling offers an opportunity to standardize major portions of the spacecraft-to-ground interface for future NASA missions. An end-to-end packet transport protocol is proposed which enables delivery of telemetry data from a remote space sensor to a ground-based user with virtually no project-unique intermediate processing. This paper reviews the possibility of creating a single telemetry format standard for both deep-space and near-earth missions. The proposed standard addresses the greatest NASA problem of the coming decade - cost - by allowing telemetry streams from many inflight spacecraft to be handled on the ground by common, simple, multimission processing elements.

Greenberg, E.↗

Performance of the image statistics decoder in conjunction with the Goldstone-VLA array

During Voyager's Neptune encounter, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Very Large Array (VLA) will be arrayed with Goldstone antennas to receive the transmitted telemetry data from the spacecraft. The telemetry signal from the VLA will drop out periodically, resulting in a periodic drop in the received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The Image Statistics Decoder (ISD), which assumes a correlation between pixels, can improve the bit error rate (BER) for images during these dropout periods. Simulation results have shown that the ISD, in conjunction with the Goldstone-VLA array can provide a 3-dB gain for uncompressed images at a BER of 5.0 x 10(exp -3).

Wang, H. C.↗

Utilization of Machine Learning Techniques for Managing the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite Constellation

National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) operates a constellation of ten geosynchronous Tracking and Data Relay Satellites (TDRS). The TDRS constellation consists of multiple geosynchronous communication relay satellites located around the equator so they can provide continual coverage of any mission in low earth orbit. The TDRS are located primarily in three oceanic regions around the earth. NASA’s White Sands Complex provides the ground communication support for TDRS located over the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Another TDRS ground station in Guam supports the TDRS over the Indian Ocean. With these satellites the TDRS network can provide continuous coverage of satellites in low-earth orbit. The NASA Space Network (SN) project office at GSFC manages the constellation of spacecraft. Major customers of the TDRS constellation include, but are not limited to, the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope. The TDRS constellation has three generations of satellites and has been active for over 30 years providing reliable communication links between customer satellites and corresponding ground stations. However, one of the major concerns for TDRS, and in any space mission, is to ensure the health and safety of the spacecraft. Generally, engineers use telemetry data to monitor and analyze the performance and state of health of the spacecraft. Telemetry data contains hundreds of parameters that monitor each important component in the spacecraft, which can be utilized to recognize and characterize the behavior of the spacecraft. Each parameter contains considerable information to represent time-dependent properties of each spacecraft subsystem and component. During the entire life of a TDRS spacecraft, thousands of gigabytes of telemetry data are transmitted in real-time from the spacecraft to the ground station at the White Sands Complex in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and recorded as historical data sets for engineers to process and analyze the events that occurred on-orbit. These parameters contain the function of multiple spacecraft subsystems, such as the attitude control system (ACS), Thermal, Electrical Power Subsystem (EPS), etc. . The first and second generations have exceeded their required lifetime and NASA is keen to manage these spacecrafts carefully in order to maximize the remaining life using the spacecraft telemetry. The challenge is to know when the risk of losing a spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit exceeds the benefit of continued operations for customer support. In the TDRS fleet, the EPS is the most critical subsystem related to spacecraft operations. Failure of the EPS would strand a spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit. Since EPS provides power to the spacecraft, component failures ultimately lead to the inability to support the spacecraft loads and the communications payload. For instance, TDRS-8 has several anomalies in EPS including the Bus Voltage Limiter (BVL) shunt current, solar array loss of circuits, and failed battery cells. Any of these anomalies can cause critical issues to the spacecraft. Therefore, developing a system to analyze and perform early detection of a potential anomaly is an important issue in telemetry data analysis. In recent years, Telemetry Mining (TM) has been proposed to process telemetry data by using Data Mining (DM) techniques such as classification, clustering, regression and anomaly detection. Anomaly detection, also known as outlier detection, has been widely used in many data mining areas such as remote sensing, medical data processing and digital image processing. The goal of anomaly detection is to detect abnormal data, which contains a relatively low probability of occurrence among the entire data set. Early detection of anomalies is one of the most significant issues in managing the spacecraft configuration. If anomalies can be detected early enough, then the redundant resources can be used to extend the life of the operational spacecraft. We present an unsupervised anomaly detection method to process the EPS data extracted from TDRS-8. This is different from traditional analytical methods, which use telemetry data to illustrate behavior and physical meaning of each spacecraft component. TM connects multiple parameters as a vector and then conducts data analysis on this high dimension telemetry vector. This method is looking at the properties of a high dimensional vector that is able to consider the relationship between different parameters in the anomaly detection problem. This kind of method performs much better than the traditional limit checking method. In addition, we propose a new approach of real-time anomaly detection to process telemetry data in real-time, which can then be applied to spacecraft monitoring with high reliability, low cost and high accuracy.

Machine Learning (ML)↗

Propagation studies

Propagation anomaly research, and telemetry signal strength prediction for manned spacecraft application

PROPAGATION↗

Spacecraft command and control using expert systems

This paper describes a product called the Intelligent Mission Toolkit (IMT), which was created to meet the changing demands of the spacecraft command and control market. IMT is a command and control system built upon an expert system. Its primary functions are to send commands to the spacecraft and process telemetry data received from the spacecraft. It also controls the ground equipment used to support the system, such as encryption gear, and telemetry front-end equipment. Add-on modules allow IMT to control antennas and antenna interface equipment. The design philosophy for IMT is to utilize available commercial products wherever possible. IMT utilizes Gensym's G2 Real-time Expert System as the core of the system. G2 is responsible for overall system control, spacecraft commanding control, and spacecraft telemetry analysis and display. Other commercial products incorporated into IMT include the SYBASE relational database management system and Loral Test and Integration Systems' System 500 for telemetry front-end processing.

Norcross, Scott↗

Telemetry Anomaly Detection System using Machine Learning to Streamline Mission Operations

Spacecraft housekeeping telemetry is monitored at flight control centers by the operations engineers using tools that can perform limit checking or simple trend analysis. Recent developments in machine learning techniques for anomaly detection enables the implementation of more sophisticated systems that aim to augment current state-of-theart mission tools to provide valuable decision support for the spacecraft operators, assisting in anomaly detection and potentially saving console time for the engineers. We will show some results of the implementation of an anomaly detection tool for the NASA Mars Science Laboratory mission.

Weber, Romann↗

Tracking the Galileo spacecraft with the DSCC Galileo Telemetry prototype

On day of the year 062, 1994, a prototype of the Deep Space Communications Complex Galileo Telemetry subsystem successfully tracked and processed signals from the Galileo spacecraft, under fully suppressed-carrier modulation. The demonstration took place at Goldstone, employing the 70-m antenna and the 34-m high-efficiency antenna. This article presents the findings from that demonstration. Specific issues are the system performance in terms of signal-to-noise (SNR) degradation and the arraying gain. Validation of the test results is via symbol-error-rate measurement and the standard symbol SNR. The analysis is also extended to include characterization of the signal received from Galileo.

Pham, T. T.↗

Near Earth asteroid rendezvous

The Spacecraft Design Course is the capstone design class for the M.S. in astronautics at the Naval Postgraduate School. The Fall 92 class designed a spacecraft for the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous Mission (NEAR). The NEAR mission uses a robotic spacecraft to conduct up-close reconnaissance of a near-earth asteroid. Such a mission will provide information on Solar System formation and possible space resources. The spacecraft is intended to complete a NEAR mission as a relatively low-budget program while striving to gather as much information about the target asteroid as possible. A complete mission analysis and detailed spacecraft design were completed. Mission analysis includes orbit comparison and selection, payload and telemetry requirements, spacecraft configuration, and launch vehicle selection. Spacecraft design includes all major subsystems: structure, electrical power, attitude control, propulsion, payload integration, and thermal control. The resulting spacecraft demonstrates the possibility to meet the NEAR mission requirements using existing technology, 'off-the-shelf' components, and a relatively low-cost launch vehicle.

Source record↗