Ground Assisted Onboard Planning Autonomy with VAMOS

The typical ground based mission planning system for a low earth satellite mission has one major drawback: The reaction time to onboard detected events includes at least the two upcoming ground station contacts. To address this disadvantage, DLR/GSOC implements the software experiment VAMOS as part of the FireBIRD mission, in which mission planning autonomy will be transferred to the spacecraft up to some extent. This paper presents the outcome of the VAMOS design phase – a concept of minimized onboard complexity which allows onboard reaction to telemetry measurements and event detection. In order to minimize risks and the computational effort onboard a solution has been chosen that demands relatively simple tasks of the onboard autonomy but nevertheless will lead to maximizing the mission output and still takes care of all potentially to be considered resource constraints.