What happens when spacecraft need to be serviced on orbit?

If your car breaks down, you can take it to any number of places for repair. Developing a model for how spacecraft can be similarly serviced while on orbit is the work of a team of researchers at Georgia Tech and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. They are working along with industry partner Redwire Space to tackle various aspects of the challenge.

“There is a pressing need to accurately assess the remaining useful life of thrusters with the most up-to-date telemetry data to decide how many more times we can refuel the spacecraft or whether we need a repair service, if that is an option,” said Joshua Rovey, professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at UIUC.

“My primary responsibility on the project is to address the challenge of spacecraft health monitoring and prediction, particularly for the thrusters, to guide informed logistics decisions. We are investigating intelligent estimation and sensing techniques to enable accurate in-flight assessment of the remaining useful life of thrusters.”

Rovey said it will include a new adaptive AI-based thruster prognostic framework that leverages both physics-based simulation/experimental data and in-flight telemetry data effectively for remaining useful life prediction for operational thrusters, as well as new sensor technologies guided by the proposed prognostic framework for enhanced remaining useful life prediction for future thrusters.

The project has two other areas of research focus. One will develop a novel, efficient network-based framework to integrate the full logistics supply chain, including the vehicle traffic flow, such as launches and maneuvers; the flow of the resources, such as fuel, spare parts, and tools; and the location and design of the associated space infrastructure, such as tool depots. The other will focus on the development of hybrid soft-rigid robotics to provide autonomous service to spacecraft on Earth and Lunar orbits.

The project, Advancing Technologies for Logistics Architectures in Space, is funded by the Air force Research Laboratory/Air Force Office of Scientific Research Space University Research Initiative or SURI.

In addition to Rovey, co-investigators on the project from Illinois are Pingfeng Wang and Girish Krishnan, who are both faculty members in the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering. The project is led by Koki Ho, director of the Space Systems Optimization Group in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Tech.