Development and On-orbit Demonstration of On-board Autonomous Operation Functions for Robust Achievement of Operation Intents

How to make satellite more autonomous in realizing intended mission functions becomes more and more important as many constellation projects and small satellite deep space missions are appearing. As it is difficult to predict all the anomalies in-orbit and prepare countermeasures for them, it would be better to reconstruct operation plan onboard when some anomaly happens, considering available resources, times and required mission functions. This technology is especially important for small/micro/nano/pico-satellites, for which ground operation work load had better be reduced as much as possible. In this paper, ``state transition model'' based method of autonomous satellite operation is proposed and its application to real satellite project is described. The first in-orbit demonstration was conducted in small scale in 2018, which will also be discussed.