AI Space Cortex: An Experimental System for Future Era Space Exploration

Our Robust, Explainable Autonomy for Scientific Icy Moon Operations (REASIMO) effort contributes to National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Concepts for Ocean worlds Life Detection Technology (COLDTech) program, which explores science platform technologies for ocean worlds such as Europa and Enceladus. Ocean world missions pose significant operational challenges. These include long communication lags, limited power, and lifetime limitations caused by radiation damage and hostile conditions. Given these operational limitations, onboard autonomy will be vital for future ocean world missions. Besides the management of nominal lander operations, onboard autonomy must react appropriately in the event of anomalies. Traditional spacecraft rely on a transition into “safe-mode” in which nonessential components and subsystems are powered off to preserve safety and maintain communication with Earth. For a severely time-limited ocean world mission, resolutions to these anomalies that can be executed without Earth-in-the-loop communication and associated delays are paramount for completion of the mission objectives and science goals. To address these challenges, the REASIMO effort aims to demonstrate a robust level of AI-assisted autonomy for such missions, including the ability to detect and recover from anomalies, and to perform missions based on pretrained behaviors rather than hard-coded, predetermined logic like all prior space missions. We developed an AI-assisted, personality-driven, intelligent framework for control of an Ocean world mission by combining a mix of advanced technologies. To demonstrate the capabilities of the framework, we perform tests of autonomous sampling operations on a lander-manipulator testbed at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), approximating possible surface conditions such a mission might encounter. This article presents the architecture and encapsulated functionality of our intelligent mission control framework, AI Space Cortex, and reports results from deployment of this technology on a flight-relevant testbed to demonstrate its handling of the challenges of autonomous sampling operations across changing system conditions.