Spacecraft Anomaly Attribution Tradecraft Must Evolve

In response to the 2010 U.S. National Space Policy’s call to “rapidly detect, warn, characterize, and attribute natural and man-made disturbances to space systems” the Spacecraft Anomalies and Failures (SCAF) Workshop has been pressing the community to improve skills in anomaly attribution. Five years of presentations, case studies, and insights have identified a clear requirement to create a spacecraft anomaly reporting standard. This new standard is motivated by the fact that previous anomaly investigations suffer from lack of diagnostics on spacecraft, limited benefit for operators to determine root cause, uncertainties in vulnerability models, and complicated space environment phenomena. As a result, it is important for this process to be both effective and efficient or else it will not be embraced. The Universal Satellite Anomalies Analysis Advisor, USA3 is a proposed starting point for this solution: must assign anomaly/failure root cause to the (1) lowest possible hardware level associated with a (2) specific causative trigger by (3) tracking symptoms in time (both in relative and absolute terms). The ability to discern the cause of a space system failure will become more important as more new space users operate new satellite systems, the orbital debris hazard continues to grow, and space system performance becomes more ubiquitous to everyday life on Earth. This paper provides a starting point that through interagency and cross-community review and refinement may evolve into an anomaly attribution framework standard