The DART Autonomy System

This paper describes the Autonomy System that flew on the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission. A detailed description of the rules-based logic is provided, including the heritage of the system, how it was tailored to meet DART’s fault management philosophy, build process, testing, and necessary in-flight updates. The purpose of the Autonomy software was to implement fault protection against components’ off-nominal behaviors and to implement a safing strategy designed to place the spacecraft in a known, safe configuration in response to critical faults while Mission Operations worked on a resolution. Aside from maintenance and fault protection tasks, the onboard Autonomy software was key to guaranteeing the execution of time-critical sequences during the mission. The resulting system was also instrumental in being the tool of choice to address anomalies in other subsystems that were discovered as early as a month into flight and as late as a month before impact.