75 upon returning from space and landing at Space Florida’s storied Launch and Landing Facility onsite at Kennedy. Sierra Space uses AI for spacecraft design and complex data-management systems for real-time data analysis. This adaptive software processes substantial volumes of information for predictive maintenance and comprehensive health management, so mission control can monitor systems in real time, vastly improving situational awareness and spacecraft safety. The technology’s adaptability extends to real-time tracking of space debris, enhancing collision avoidance measures, and supporting autonomous navigation and communication systems. This isn’t the only autonomous winged craft in orbit. The US military has the X37-B, a similar design that is also a quarter of the size of the Space Shuttle. The avionics are designed to automate all de-orbit and landing functions. The craft was built by Boeing with a lighter composite structure, rather than the traditional aluminium, and a new generation of high-temperature wing leading-edge tiles and toughened uni-piece fibrous refractory oxidation-resistant ceramic tiles. The flight controls and brakes use all electro-mechanical actuation with no hydraulics. The craft is designed to stay in orbit for 207 days, but it operated for over 900 days during its sixth mission in 2022, carrying experiments for the US military. Meanwhile, UAV maker Anduril Technologies is looking to use its avionics technology for space systems. The company aims to develop fully integrated hardware and software systems based on its Lattice software platform to autonomously monitor and manage space-based assets, using AI with modular mission payloads. Anduril aims to develop its own fully integrated systems by the end of 2025. This mission will serve as a testbed for maturation of multiple Anduril and third-party payloads. For systems in orbit, Aethero has teamed up with Antmicro to use opensource tools to develop hardware for AI in space applications. They are developing flight-ready modular edge computers that can handle space AI and data processing on satellites. The software and hardware co-development workflows use open-source plus an automationdriven approach to all parts of the stack to reduce design and development times. Aethero has developed the spacequalified NxN Edge Computing Module as a radiation-hardened computing platform, which has its roots in Antmicro’s open-source Nvidia Jetson Orin Baseboard. This was developed with an open hardware design flow with the Antmicro KiCad and Blender tools. Antmicro provided the basis of both the Linux and Zephyr RTOS software controlling the payload, and implemented its own open-source RDFM framework for a modular, configurable platform. The complete software stack for the onboard system was built and tested with Renode, Antmicro’s open-source simulator, to speed up the development process and increase testing coverage across a range of scenarios. Swarms on Mars A mission to Mars plans to use a swarm of robotic systems. Researchers at the University of Wuerzburg in Germany are developing a system that can explore an enormous canyon that stretches across the red planet. Valles Marineris is 3,000 km long, 600 km wide and an average of 8 km deep. Since 2012, this largest known canyon in the solar system has been the focus of a project by the German Space Agency at the German Aerospace Centre (DLR). The Valles Marineris Explorer (VaMEx) initiative aims to develop key technologies for robotic exploration of this difficult terrain in a complex swarm of driving, walking and flying autonomous vehicles. They will explore the canyon’s gorges and caves for the first time, and search for traces of liquid water. “We have given our sub-project the name VaMEx3-MarsSymphony, because the aim is to make the individual elements of the robot swarm play together harmoniously, like an orchestra,” says project leader Professor Hakan Kayal. In the current development phase, the swarm includes mobile robots in the air and on land, a stationary gateway on the ground that serves as a command centre for communications and a satellite simulator for data exchange with Earth. When the robots on the ground enter caves they are shielded from the surface of Mars and cannot communicate directly with the gateway, so the concept includes repeater stations, which pass on the recorded images and data in a transport chain – from the robot in the cave to the gateway on the surface of the planet. Space vehicles | Insight Uncrewed Systems Technology | October/November 2024 The Tenacity space plane is planned for launch in 2025 (Image courtesy of Sierra Space)
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