Towards Robust, Resilient Ocean World Science Sampling Systems

Abstract

NASA's search for life and habitable regions in our solar system could lead to future landed missions on Europa and Enceladus, whose ocean worlds may support life. However, these destinations pose significant operational challenges - distance makes for a long communications lag, the lifetime of landed assets will be limited by radiation damage and hostile conditions, and any mission will be constrained by finite duration power. These conditions demand a high degree of autonomy in order to carry out the excavation, collection, and transfer of samples to in-situ scientific instruments, and to communicate results back to Earth. Our Robust, Explainable Autonomy for Scientific Icy Moon Operations (REASIMO) effort aims to improve the science yield and robustness of these kinds of missions by increasing the level of flight-qualifiable autonomy that can be applied to such operations. This is to be achieved by recognizing, and where possible, handling anomalies in situ, whether caused by faults, degradations, failures, or other unexpected conditions.

Additional details