Spacecraft Autonomy Flight Experience: The DS1 Remote Agent Experiment

In May 1999 state-of-the-art autonomy technology was allowed to assume command and control of the Deep Space One spacecraft during the Remote Agent Experiment. This experiment demonstrated numerous autonomy concepts ranging from high-level goaloriented commanding to on-board planning to robust plan execution to model-based fault protection. Many lessons of value to future enhancements of spacecraft autonomy were learned in preparing for and executing this experiment. This paper describes those lessons and suggests directions of future work in this field.