Autonomous Onboard Health and Usage Management System for Smart Satellites

While, over the past few years, CubeSat technology started to become popular, another fundamental and innovative aspect stands out, such as the Intelligent Health and Mission Management (IHMM). “Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change”, Stephen Hawking said during his Oxford University graduation speech. Intelligence, adapt, change. These are the key words of this quote that it is important to focus on. IHMM systems, in effect, allow to predict degradation of subsystems performance, implementing real-time system health forecasts that permit to have enough time to detect, identify and suddenly recover a possible fault, guaranteeing CubeSat safety and letting the system fulfil its operations, while ensuring an acceptable quality of functional capability. It is necessary to notice that space is clearly not the friendliest environment, because of the occurrence of unpredictable events, such as external environmental forces that affect satellites orbit and attitude, considering that the smaller they are, the more influenced they will be. Attitude Determination and Control System (ADCS) is a crucial subsystem that enables to maintain desired attitude for the purpose of pointing a specific subject or antennas to communicate and to counteract external disturbance forces. The aim of this thesis is to demonstrate how IHMM systems shall be integrated in a satellite to enhance its performances, with a particular focus on ADCS and the Communication system. To accomplish these points, the thesis will introduce the subsystems’ design choices, followed by a failure analysis of the ADCS components with a possible diagnosis. An AI-based algorithm will be also implemented in a Digital Twin of the satellite in order to predict the behaviour of the system and to diagnose or recover from the different faulty scenarios. Lastly, after the simulation process, the results will be discussed, and it will be left the door open to further research.