Deep Learning-Based Anomaly Detection in Spacecraft Telemetry on Edge Devices
It addresses the challenge of real-time anomaly detection for spacecraft missions, enabling practical on-board deployment on constrained hardware like CubeSats, though it is incremental as it optimizes existing methods.
This paper tackled the problem of deploying sophisticated anomaly detection models on spacecraft edge devices with hardware constraints, achieving optimized models that maintain 88.8% detection performance while reducing RAM usage by 97.1% to 59 KB and operations by 99.4%.
Spacecraft anomaly detection is critical for mission safety, yet deploying sophisticated models on-board presents significant challenges due to hardware constraints. This paper investigates three approaches for spacecraft telemetry anomaly detection -- forecasting & threshold, direct classification, and image classification -- and optimizes them for edge deployment using multi-objective neural architecture optimization on the European Space Agency Anomaly Dataset. Our baseline experiments demonstrate that forecasting & threshold achieves superior detection performance (92.7% Corrected Event-wise F0.5-score (CEF0.5)) [1] compared to alternatives. Through Pareto-optimal architecture optimization, we dramatically reduced computational requirements while maintaining capabilities -- the optimized forecasting & threshold model preserved 88.8% CEF0.5 while reducing RAM usage by 97.1% to just 59 KB and operations by 99.4%. Analysis of deployment viability shows our optimized models require just 0.36-6.25% of CubeSat RAM, making on-board anomaly detection practical even on highly constrained hardware. This research demonstrates that sophisticated anomaly detection capabilities can be successfully deployed within spacecraft edge computing constraints, providing near-instantaneous detection without exceeding hardware limitations or compromising mission safety.