Advancing Future Space Habitation: A Cyber-Physical Testbed for Space Power System

With the growing interest in space exploration, the need for advanced technologies to support future missions has become increasingly crucial. Among these technologies, a highly reliable power system is needed to withstand extreme space environments and external disturbances. A cyber-physical testbed (CPT) emerges as a valuable platform for testing and validating extraterrestrial microgrids, enabling the assessment of their resilience and performance under realistic conditions. This article presents a CPT based on power hardware in the loop (PHIL). The testbed incorporates physical components such as solar arrays, pressure and temperature control systems, and electronic loads that mimic habitat loads, along with cyber components like nuclear generation, energy storage systems, and other space habitat loads. This testbed provides unique capability to thoroughly evaluate the behavior of the space microgrid under various load management scenarios, particularly in response to unexpected disturbances. By emulating realistic conditions, the testbed allows us to analyze the power system’s performance, assess its robustness, and identify areas for improvement in terms of power management, load prioritization, and fault mitigation within a space microgrid.