March, 2022
Emergent Space Technologies, Inc. (Emergent) was awarded a Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract with NASA to prototype flight software for onboard task planning and plan management. This work supports the need of government and commercial space operators for greater autonomy in supporting distributed missions in challenging environments, for example, cislunar and deep space. According to Dr. Timothy Woodbury, Principal Investigator for the project, “Migrating planning from ground systems to space systems enables spacecraft to respond immediately to unplanned data collection opportunities without first contacting a ground station. This will reduce latency and operational costs, as well as improving overall performance.” This project will support both commercial Earth-observing missions as well as government missions, such as NASA’s Luna Net infrastructure and the Space Development Agency’s (SDA’s) National Defense Space Architecture (NDSA).