NASA links fault management to mission design for autonomy

NASA and Qualtech Systems Inc. have demonstrated a design workflow that connects fault management — software and procedures for detecting and mitigating failures — directly to the mission model, using early design information from NASA's HelioSwarm mission.

The old separation created a practical weakness. Systems engineering often defined a nominal spacecraft first, while system health management and fault management were added later, NASA says. Different teams and disconnected knowledge repositories could produce inconsistent analyses. The QSI approach brings those activities into the model-based systems engineering process from the beginning, so engineers can test how a design responds to simulated component-level physical and functional failures.

The link runs through SysML v2, the latest iteration of the Systems Modeling Language used to represent system designs. QSI worked with the SysML v2 Submission Team to incorporate fault-management concepts and translate SysML v2 models into failure-space models for its commercial toolset. Engineers can then perform Fault Modes, Effects, and Criticality Analyses and Fault Tree Analyses to examine diagnostics and system availability, while the tool can recommend design changes such as sensor locations.

The demonstration used HelioSwarm's early mission design. The future NASA heliophysics mission will use one hub and eight co-orbiting small satellites to make simultaneous, multiscale measurements of magnetic-field fluctuations and proton flows in the cislunar space environment, with spacecraft separations ranging from tens to thousands of kilometers.

So what changes in practice? Mission teams could compare fault-management options while the architecture is still being designed, rather than discovering missing detection or diagnosis capabilities after the nominal system is complete. NASA says that could potentially lower total development cost, improve coordination, and reduce cost and schedule risks. The result remains a demonstrated modeling capability: no source here establishes that HelioSwarm is already operating autonomously in space or that the tool's recommendations have been independently validated in flight.