r ’ A New Approach in Spacecraft Monitoring

The NASA Deep Space Network (DSN) is preparing to experiment with a new way of supporting highly autonomous missions. The spacecraft will have on-board intelligence to determine whether it is healthy and when ground contact is needed. It will transmit one of 4 monitoring messages to the ground instead of normal full engineering telemetry of the spacecraft health. These messages will be monitored by a ground station. Based on the urgency of the message, the DSN will schedule an antenna to receive telemetry. Deep space missions traditionally schedule ground antennas to receive engineering telemetry up to several times per week. This new approach can reduce the monitoring time to a few minutes per day and engineering te/emetry once evey several weeks. This approach will be demonstrated on the first Ne w Millennium Deep Space One (DS1) mission through the Beacon Monitor Experiment (BMOX), and is being considered for use on upcoming missions to Europa and Pluto and possibly other missions. This paper describes the end-to-end system design, operational scenarios, performance of the ground monitor, and the DS 1 experiment