New Millennium Program Research Articles

The Deep Space 1 Mission: Flight Validation of New Technology

On September 22 2001 NASA’s Deep Space 1 (DS1) spacecraft passed 2171 km from the nucleus of comet 19P/Borrelly. DS1, the first mission in NASA’s New Millennium Program (NMP), was also the first mission to use solar electric propulsion (SEP) as primary propulsion. In addition, it was NASA’s first spacecraft with both an imaging system and a plasma mass spectrometer to encounter a comet The primary focus of the NMP is to identify and flight validate new, advanced technologies that hold great promise for revolutionizing observations from earth orbit or in deep space. Such technologies, despite being technically mature, have not been demonstrated in space and hence are perceived to present a fairly high risk to missions that propose to use them for the first time. In order to help reduce the costs and risks to future missions that use these technologies, NMP oversees a series of dedicated “technology validation” missions into deep space and around Earth to validate these technologies and prove that they perform as intended in space. Since DS1 there have been four completed follow-on NMP validation activities (DS2, Earth Observing I, Space Technology 5 (ST5), and ST 6 Autonomous Sciencecraft Experiment) and four more are under development (ST 6 Inertial Stellar Compass, ST7 Disturbance Reduction System, ST8 and five concepts in Phase A for ST9). NMP projects can be either stand alone missions or payloads on other earth orbiting or deep space missions. The DS1 payload contained a set of technologies that were successfully validated in the first phase of the mission. The principal, or project defining technology validated on DS1 was SEP. The SEP primary propulsion system on DS1 ionized xenon gas in a thrust

Multifunctional Structures for Advanced Spacecraft

Lockheed Martin Astronautics (LMA) is involved in the development of enabling technologies for ad- vanced spacecraft. One of the key elements of these efforts is the application of multifunctional structures (MFS) designs. The MFS design system incorporates electronics, thermal control, and structure design into a single spacecraft structural element. The electrical interconnect system is based on flexible circuit patches and jumpers that eliminate the need for black- boxes 'and cable harnesses. The system is ideally suited for high-density electronics such as multichip modules (MCM) and micro electromechanical sys- tems devices. Novel thermal techniques are incor- porated into the structure to handle the localized high heatloads. The MFS design has been included as a technology demonstration in a variety of NASA/Air Force missions such as New Millennium Program (NMP) Deep Space 1 (DSl), NMP Deep Space 2 (DS2), Space Technology Research Vehicle (STRV)- Id, MightySat II Sindri, and Advanced Technology Demonstration Spacecraft (ATDS). During the DSl mission, the MFS flight experiment has successfully performed electrical-interconnect continuity tests and measurements of thermal performance consistent with the predicted performance.

An autonomous spacecraft agent prototype

This paper describes the New Millennium Remote Agent (NMRA) architecture for autonomous spacecraft control systems. The architecture supports challenging requirements of the autonomous spacecraft domain not usually addressed in mobile robot architectures, including highly reliable autonomous operations over extended time periods in the presence of tight resource constraints, hard deadlines, limited observability, and concurrent activity. A hybrid architecture, NMRA integrates traditional real-time monitoring and control with heterogeneous components for constraint-based planning and scheduling, robust multi-threaded execution, and model-based diagnosis and reconfiguration. Novel features of this integrated architecture include support for robust closed-loop generation and execution of concurrent temporal plans and a hybrid procedural/deductive executive. We implemented a prototype autonomous spacecraft agent within the architecture and successfully demonstrated the prototype in the context of a challenging autonomous mission scenario on a simulated spacecraft. As a result of this success, the integrated architecture has been selected to fly as an autonomy experiment on Deep Space One (DS-1), the first flight of NASA‘s New Millennium Program (NMP), which will launch in 1998. It will be the first AI system to autonomously control an actual spacecraft.

AI coming of age: NASA uses AI for autonomous space exploration

At the end of the 20th Century, many organizations are rethinking the way they do business and are retooling with the ever-moving target of "new technologies". NASA is no exception. To reduce the cost of space-exploration missions while increasing their number, NASA began the revolutionary New Millennium Program (NMP) in early 1995. At the NMP's center is a push for self-guiding and self-regulating spacecraft. This will change the ground-control staff requirements from the hundreds required now for a major planetary science mission to a mere handful. The vision is to be able to "fire and forget" a whole series of missions that will go about their business of exploring, contacting home only when they find something of scientific interest or need help. Each spacecraft would manage its own travel, malfunctions, and much of the science.

Success criteria and risk management for the new millennium program

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) New Millennium Program (NMP) is a technology development and validation program that will flight-validate advanced, new technologies with space flight applications. NMP's purpose is twofold. First, it will develop technologies that will enable future spacecraft to be smaller, more capable and reliable, and to be launched more frequently. Second, it will validate the technologies in flight to reduce the risks to future science missions that fly these technologies for the first time. To measure the program's success, NMP has devised a set of criteria that stresses the relevance of technologies selected for flight validation to NASA's 21st-century science mission needs. Also, NMP has instituted a ‘risk management’ policy, where, through a combination of adequate resources and early risk assessment and risk mitigation plans for the technologies, the overall risk of the NMP flights can be rendered acceptable.

Advanced flight computing technologies for validation by NASA's new millennium program

The New Millennium Program (NMP) consists of a series of Deep-Space and Earth Orbiting missions that are technology-driven, in contrast to the more traditional science-driven space exploration missions of the past. These flights are designed to validate technologies that will enable a new era of low-cost highly miniaturized and highly capable spacebome applications in the new millennium. In addition to the series of flight projects managed by separate flight teams, the NMP technology initiatives are managed by the following six focused technology programs: Microelectronics Systems, Autonomy, Telecommunications, Instrument Technologies and Architectures, In-Situ Instruments and Micro-electromechanical Systems, and Modular and Multifunctional Systems. Each technology program is managed as an Integrated Product Development Team (IPDT) of government, academic, and industry partners. In this paper, we will describe elements of the technology roadmap proposed by the NMP Microelectronics IPDT. Moreover, we will relate the proposed technology roadmap to existing NASA technology development programs, such as the Advanced Flight Computing (AFC) program, and the Remote Exploration and Experimentation (REE) program, which constitute part of the on-going NASA technology development pipeline. We will also describe the Microelectronics Systems technologies that have been accepted as part of the first New Millennium Deep-Space One spacecraft, which is an asteroid fly-by mission scheduled for launched in July 1998.

The new millennium program: Fast-track procurements

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA's) New Millennium Program (NMP) has embarked on a technology flight-validation demonstration program to enable the kinds of missions that NASA envisions for the 21st century. Embedded in this program is the concept of rapid mission development supported by a fast-track procurement process. This process begins with the decision to initiate a procurement very early in the program along with the formation of a technical acquisition team. A close working relationship among the team members is essential to avoiding delays and developing a clear acquisition plan. The request for proposal (RFP) that is subsequently issued seeks a company with proven capabilities, so that the time allotted for responses from proposers and the length of proposals they submit can be shortened. The fast-track procurement process has been demonstrated during selection of NMP's industrial partners and has been proven to work.

Reduced cost and increased capability through technology in the new millennium

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA's) New Millennium Program (NMP) is designed to reduce the cost of spacecraft in the 21st century while simultaneously increasing spacecraft capabilities, thereby increasing the return on our investment in space exploration. The NMP process is being enacted in the following manner. We are developing a science vision for the 21st century and identifying the attendant missions of this vision. These missions, in turn, will specify the capabilities that future spacecraft require. Technology-validation flights will be selected to demonstrate specific high pay-off technologies needed to provide these capabilities. These key technologies are categorized by certain areas—autonomy, microelectronics, communications, and so on — and will be flight validated prior to the 21st century in order to enable our vision for the next century. To that end, and keeping in mind our science vision, the technologies will primarily be those that allow us to reduce the size of spacecraft instruments, and in turn the size of the spacecraft itself, so that smaller launch vehicles can be employed. Also, these technologies will provide for autonomous spacecraft capability and shorter mission flight times so that the ground operations staff for future space missions can be reduced, thus bringing down costs in this area as well. This paper presents specific examples of these key technologies and their pay-offs.