VAMOS – Verification of Autonomous Mission Planning On-board a Spacecraft

For typical ground based mission planning systems for low earth satellite missions one major drawback can be detected: The reaction time to on-board-detected events, which includes at least two ground station contacts. To correct this, the DLR/GSOC invented VAMOS, which is an autonomous concept of minimized on-board complexity which allows on-board reaction to telemetry measurements and event detection. This experiment will be part of the FireBIRD mission and verify the gain when mission planning autonomy is transferred to the spacecraft up to some extent. This paper presents the outcome of the design phase under the given constraints. In order to minimize risks and computational effort on-board, a solution has been chosen that demands relatively simple tasks of the on-board autonomy but nevertheless will lead to maximizing the mission output and on the other hand takes care of all potentially to be considered resource constraints