Rule-based analysis for talking to spacecraft

  • David Rydeheard (Participant)
  • Howard Barringer (Participant)
  • Reger, Giles (Participant)

Impact: Economic, Technological

Narrative

Spacecraft missions represent enormous investment (billions of dollars) for NASA. It is critical to protect this investment by ensuring missions operate safely, and perform as expected. Researchers at The University of Manchester developed novel fundamental methods in runtime verification, that were implemented in two of NASA’s software tools - TraceContract and LogFire - used to analyse commands (sent to spacecraft) and telemetry (received from spacecraft).These tools (i) protect the multi-billion dollar investments of NASA, providing automated methods to identify bugs in command sequences, and (ii) provide human readable interpretation of sensor readings, enabling NASA engineers to continuously and reliably monitor the health of the spacecraft. These tools were (and are) used on a daily basis to guarantee safe operation in high profile NASA missions:
● LADEE lunar mission (Sept 2013 - April 2014: overall cost USD280,000,000),
● Curiosity Rover on Mars (Nov 2011 - present: overall cost USD2,500,000,000)
Impact date1 Aug 2016 → 31 Jul 2020
Category of impactEconomic, Technological
Impact levelAdoption

Research Beacons, Institutes and Platforms

  • Institute for Data Science and AI

Documents & Links

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