Space-exploration missions yield massive amounts of complex heterogeneous scientific and housekeeping data (images, spectrometry, telemetry and other). These data, in turn, are used for tackling two major types of challenges: (1) discovery and (2) operations. The former refer to challenges that include modeling and forecasting space weather, mapping planet surfaces, galaxy profiling, identifying exoplanets and their environment, as well as analyzing astrobiology data. The latter, operations challenges, include autonomous spacecraft route planning, optimal spacecraft operations (forecasting and decision making), anomaly detection and diagnosis, mission planning as well as analysis of the spacecraft configuration flow.
Spacecraft operation challenges concern remote spacecraft that operate under limited computational constraints in harsh environments, equipped with decaying batteries and components (e.g., processors and memory) lagging decades behind the current state-of-the-art technology. Moreover, they are associated with high-cost of failure, where repairs are impossible, diagnosis limited and emergency reaction-times long and unpredictable.
There is great potential for state-of-the-art AI approaches that address these challenges and tasks, particularly related to spacecraft longevity and endurance. These range from mining structured data, data streams and learning representations, to developing novel heuristics search algorithms, to designing efficient approaches that can operate on limited-capacity hardware. The potential benefits include estimating the current and predicting the future states (such as power consumption, thermal radiation, position etc.) of a spacecraft thus allowing for autonomous decisions and seamless operation; detecting anomalous spacecraft behaviour in ongoing missions; mission operation planning; optimization of instrument operation; decision support and what-if analyses; explainable AI for operator empowerment etc.
The goal of this workshop is to bring attention to these challenges and offer a platform for discussing efforts and solutions from different communities across the different AI disciplines. The workshop will present the potential of recent AI approaches applied to these challenges including, but not limited to, spacecraft monitoring and operations, mission planning and management, autonomous spacecraft operations and explainable AI. More importantly, it will highlight the overarching goals and challenges of analysing large volumes of spacecraft telemetry data as well as designing, developing and deploying methods that operate on limited-capacity hardware in high-radiation environments.