Demonstrating Autonomy for Complex Space Missions: A Europa Lander Mission Autonomy Prototype

What is it about?

The Europa Lander mission is a very complex mission that will face extreme uncertainty. Europa is too far from Earth for frequent communication. There is also a large amount of radiation from Jupiter that is harmful for electronics. Therefore the mission will be short and the Lander will need to complete its tasks quickly. Our paper describes how we have designed a software prototype that can address these challenges by acting autonomously with limited supervision from human operators on Earth.

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