A Novel Fault Investigation Toolkit for System Health Management and Crew Autonomy in Off-World Habitats

As human space exploration extends beyond low-Earth orbit to the Moon and Mars, space habitats will become more capable and increasingly complex. These complexities, coupled with growing communication delays associated with deep space exploration, challenge existing ground-based fault diagnostic architectures currently afforded to crews aboard the International Space Station. Novel anomaly response architectures that would enable crew members to investigate and respond to these faults independently of mission control could enable a sustained off-world human presence on Mars. This article presents the Dynamic Anomaly Response and Integrated Analysis (DARIA), a novel anomaly response architecture for fault detection, isolation, and resolution. We propose a paradigm shift from traditional anomaly response approaches tied to ground support to a new conops that couples targeted data collection with automated analysis to reduce investigation time. DARIA's distributed sensing architecture employs small palm-sized ad-hoc sensor nodes, called the System for Telemetry Amalgamation of Multimodal PrognosticS (STAMPS), which can be dynamically placed to provide state estimation of system health. DARIA’s integrated analysis tools utilize baseline condition data and timely data collected with STAMPS, along with existing operational data, to estimate system health, detect potential faults, and generate actionable information products for crew. Data products and analytical results are then presented to crew by a graphic user interface to increase habitat state awareness and to inform mitigative action. This article presents DARIA's novel distributed sensing architecture including STAMPS, integrated analysis implementation, dashboard prototype, and anomaly response concept of operations.