Autonomous Safeing and Fault Protection for the New Horizons Mission to Pluto
- Paper number
IAC-06-D1.4.07
- Author
Mr. Robert Moore, The John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, United States
- Year
2006
- Abstract
As the first voyage to a new class of planets in the farthest zone of the solar system, New Horizons is a historic mission of exploration. The United States has made history by being the first nation to reach every planet from Mercury to Neptune with a space probe. The New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt--the first NASA launch to a "new" planet since Voyager nearly thirty years ago--allows the U.S. to complete the reconnaissance of the solar system. The New Horizons spacecraft has backup devices for its major electronic modules, and also has a heavily cross-strapped architecture that makes the spacecraft fully tolerant of almost all single-point failures. The onboard fault protection system detects failure of a component and autonomously activates the backup system as necessary. The onboard safeing system detects anomalies in spacecraft performance, such as attitude control errors or propulsion system problems, and then autonomously places the spacecraft into one of two safe states. The implementation of this onboard fault protection and safeing is described in detail. New Horizons' journey is planned to take it more than four billion miles from Earth, where the Sun is just a bright star in the dark sky. Besides taking longer than four hours to reach Pluto and nearby Kuiper Belt objects, light from the Sun is 1,000 times fainter there than at Earth. This means that the New Horizons spacecraft could not be powered by solar energy. Some of the unique features of New Horizons' power system will be described, and the impact this design had on the autonomy system design is presented in detail. Because of the special features of the New Horizons spacecraft system architecture, the onboard autonomy system is a unique, first-of-its-kind design. The unique features of the autonomy system design are described.
- Abstract document
- Manuscript document
IAC-06-D1.4.07.pdf (🔒 authorized access only).
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