Earth Independent Operations Anomaly Response (EIO-AR)

The Mars Campaign Office Anomaly Response Portfolio will develop novel technologies and techniques to support the crew of a future Mars Mission to respond to time-critical, unanticipated faults independent from Earth in a timely and effective manner.

The likelihood that the crew will face a high-consequence problem of uncertain origin during spaceflight is high, conservatively exceeding 50% during Mars transit, based on historical trends (Valinia et al., 2021). On current human spaceflight missions, large ground teams with access to vast datasets (including telemetry and engineering data) immediately respond to these unanticipated events and direct crew action. Communication delays for Mars missions are expected to take up to 44 minutes round trip, and may include periods of communication dropout, making traditional Earth-based response impractical. In these cases, Crew will need to be able to respond to short time-to-effect unanticipated or ambiguous faults, independent from earth. This is a significant adjustment from current operations and needs novel techniques and technologies to enable it.

The Anomaly Response Portfolio is split into the following projects:

• AR1 Diagnostics: technologies and techniques for inferring health characteristics of a system to support fault response and hypothesis generation (AR2). Includes technologies for anomaly detection, determining if a fault is “unknown” (i.e., out of family) or ambiguous, and isolating known faults.
• AR2 Fault Hypothesis Generation: technologies and techniques for 1. producing a set of fault hypotheses, 2. isolating (i.e.., eliminating incorrect hypothesis), and 3. recommending (i.e., synthesizing results from multiple technologies to identify most-likely hypothesis).
• AR3 Procedure Synthesis: synthesize a novel procedure for response (fault investigation, mitigation, or resolution) for unknown or ambiguous faults.
• AR4 Procedure Validation: validating a novel procedure received from crew or procedure synthesis according to metrics of Crew Safety, Mission Success, and Maintaining Capabilities.
• AR5 Crew Diagnostic Interface: enable the crew to analyze anomaly information and support intervention decision making.
• AR6 Time to Effect: estimate the duration of time until an effect of an anomaly is experienced and the nature of the effect.
• AR7 Autonomous Safing: technologies to support autonomous safing if the time to effect is too short for crew to respond.
• AR8 Large Language Models (LLMs): Leverage LLM AI technologies to support and enable AR technologies

Enabling future Mars Mission: This technology enables the effective response by crew, independent from earth, for short-time-to-effect unanticipated and ambiguous faults in crewed mars missions. This is an important technology for ensuring crew safety and mission success for future mars missions where traditional Earth-based response will be impractical.

For current Missions: This technology has the potential to improve the ability of astronauts to perform activities onboard the International Space Station (ISS) and gateway more efficiently and independent from earth, freeing up time of both crew and group support.

This is early/mid-stage (TRL 3) — the most realistic path in is NASA SBIR/STTR, which funds small businesses and research institutions to develop technology aligned with NASA's needs (equity-free, phased funding). Check whether a current SBIR/STTR solicitation topic overlaps with this project's technology area, or contact the project directly (above) to ask.

None of these are guaranteed paths for this specific project — TechPort itself doesn't have an "apply" button. Reaching out to the contact(s) above with a specific question is usually the fastest way to find out what's actually open.