Description: One of NASA’s key challenges in moving its human spaceflight activities from low Earth orbit to the Moon and beyond is the need for increased autonomy and diagnostic capabilities to address system failures. The far greater distance impacts many aspects of these missions and the vehicles and habitational modules necessary to achieve them. A key aspect of on-board autonomy for most if not all NASA space systems is Fault Management (FM). Capabilities implemented in software to control hardware redundancy or to perform safing or abort actions are the ones most commonly tagged with the FM label. More generally, FM also includes human performance of FM functions such as detection, diagnosis, prognosis (trending), deciding on what actions to take in response to failure, and executing those responses. The QSI-led team proposes to develop, demonstrate, and deploy a technology solution for performing real-time diagnostics and failure impact assessment on the Gateway station and on the ground to support mission operations of Gateway with a mirrored deployment of TEAMS-RDS (Ground) with TEAMS-RT (Onboard). The QSI software will connect to the Vehicle System Manager (VSM) software on-board Gateway, and to the various workstations in the Mission Control Center-Houston. QSI software will integrate with the planned software infrastructure, such as core Flight Software (cFS), and publish and subscribe to cFS messages as needed and will leverage the Gateway-in-a-Box simulator framework developed by NASA JSC for solution integration testing, verification and validation.

Benefits: The proposed capabilities will be of high value to HEOMD NASA missions, where a well-designed and robust FM system is a necessity in order to minimize risks associated with critical effects such as Loss of Mission (LOM), Loss of Vehicle (LOV) and Loss of Crew (LOC). The key target NASA application for the proposed technology are the vehicles that comprise Project Artemis, namely the Lunar Gateway, the Human Landing System, Orion spacecraft and the Space Launch System (SLS) heavy-lift rocket.

Potential non-NASA applications in the defense industry segment being considered are the various UAVs, UUVs, and AUVs such as Lockheed Martin’s Marlin AUV, and KMAX unmanned helicopter; Northrop Grumman’s planned Bat Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS), and existing X-47B UCAS and BAE’s Ground Combat Vehicles - all of which require a combination of autonomous and ground control.