This paper reports a design study for a space-based decametric wavelength telescope. While not a new concept, this design study focused on many of the operational aspects that would be required for an actual mission. This design optimized the number of spacecraft to insure good visibility of approx. 80% of the radio galaxies-the primary science target for the mission. A 5,000 km lunar orbit was selected to guarantee minimal gravitational perturbations from Earth and lower radio interference. Optimal schemes for data downlink, spacecraft ranging, and power consumption were identified. An optimal mission duration of 1 year was chosen based on science goals, payload complexity, and other factors. Finally, preliminary simulations showing image reconstruction were conducted to confirm viability of the mission. This work is intended to show the viability and science benefits of conducting multi-spacecraft networked radio astronomy missions in the next few years.
Currently, spacecraft are not operated as autonomous coordinated teams. Generalized reasoning capability offered by advanced distributed s o h a r e technology and AI have the potential to cope with unexpected events and uncertainty and allow to close the loop of perception, decision and eventually deliberation, D n board. The team members play different interchangeable roles and they negotiate the task that they ue achieving together. We present a multi-agent system :o provide a high degree of autonomy and support for :oordination among team members. We use JPL Formation flying mission initial architectures as ienchmark.Our target is to avoid nconsistencies/disagreements between two or more iarticipants in a collaborative context, increase the iystem's fault tolerance in cases such as loss of a member while the system should be able to still reliably operate. We address the cooperation between independent tutonomous agents when they have to collaborate to ichieve a common goal. In a top-down organization, gents are coordinated in a hierarchical fashion, where the gents at the top of the hierarchy make the majority of the ntelligent group decisions. In a more structured, but still iierarchical organization, lower-level agents exercise nore intelligence in making group decisions. A lowereve1 agent can advance a plan for the others to follow, md then a higher rank agent will decide on the best plans iroduced by individual agents. Although more rigid, the entralized intelligence organization allows for less ommunication among agents, so is more straightforward D implement. The decentralized approach requires more ommunication, but the intelligence is truly distributed, which makes for a more flexible, adaptive and efficient organization.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.