Smart architecture for highly available, robust and autonomous satellite

Abstract European leader for satellite systems and at the forefront of orbital infrastructures, Thales Alenia Space is a joint venture between Thales (67%) and Finmeccanica (33%) and forms with Telespazio a Space Alliance. Thales Alenia Space is a worldwide reference in telecoms, radar and optical Earth observation, defense and security, navigation and science. Thales Alenia Space has 11 industrial sites in 4 European countries (France, Italy, Spain and Belgium) with over 7,200 employees worldwide. Satellite evolution and wish to design more autonomous mission imply an enhancement of satellite architecture to enable the smart control of spacecraft. New system architecture needs to be defined to permit the decision-taking, and special attention has to be paid to FDIR (Fault Detection, Isolation and Recovery) and the way action can be engaged. Nevertheless the constraints on architecture and related technique composing it, stay still invariant: robustness, high availability, industrially viable and cost efficient. This paper gives first some elements about a decisional architecture defined in joined work by Thales Alenia Space and CNES, then the current context of FDIR is briefly described and then a new FIDR strategy permitting smart decision is introduced, finally the way decision can be engaged on-board for the next generation of autonomous satellites is presented.