Spacecraft Time-Series Online Anomaly Detection Using Deep Learning

Anomaly detection in spacecraft telemetry channels is of great importance, especially considering the extremeness of the spacecraft operating environment. These anomalies often function as precursors for system failure. Currently, domain experts manually monitor telemetry channels, which is time-consuming and limited in scope. An automated approach to anomaly detection would be ideal, considering that each satellite system has thousands of channels to monitor. Deep learning models have been shown to be effective at capturing the normal behavior of the channels and flagging any abnormalities. However, each channel needs a unique model trained on it, and high performing models have been shown to require an increased training time. We instead propose training deep learning models in an online manner to quickly understand the behavior of a given channel and identify anomalies in real-time. This greatly reduces the amount of training time required to obtain a model for each channel. We present the results of our approach to show that we can achieve performance comparable to state-of-the-art spacecraft anomaly detection methods with minimal training time.