Fault Management Technologies

NASA’s science program has well over 100 spacecraft in operation, formulation, or development, generating science data accessible to researchers everywhere. As science missions are given increasingly complex goals, often on compressed timetables, and have more pressure to reduce operations costs, system autonomy must increase in response. Fault Management (FM) is one of the key components of system autonomy. FM consists of operational mitigations of spacecraft failures and is implemented with spacecraft hardware and on-board autonomous software that controls hardware, software, and information redundancy, in concert with ground-based software and operations procedures. Despite a wealth of lessons learned from past missions, spacecraft failures are still not uncommon, and reuse of FM approaches is very limited, illustrating that advancements are needed in FM Design Tools, FM Visualization Tools, FM Operations Approaches, FM Verification and Validation Tools, and FM