A data-driven method of health monitoring for spacecraft

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to detect the occurrence of anomaly and fault in a spacecraft, investigate various tendencies of telemetry parameters and evaluate the operation state of the spacecraft to monitor the health of the spacecraft. Design/methodology/approach This paper proposes a data-driven method (empirical mode decomposition-sample entropy-principal component analysis [EMD-SE-PCA]) for monitoring the health of the spacecraft, where EMD is used to decompose telemetry data and obtain the trend items, SE is utilised to calculate the sample entropies of trend items and extract the characteristic data and squared prediction error and statistic contribution rate are analysed using PCA to monitor the health of the spacecraft. Findings Experimental results indicate that the EMD-SE-PCA method could detect characteristic parameters that appear abnormally before the anomaly or fault occurring, could provide an abnormal early warning time before anomaly or fault appearing and summarise the contribution of each parameter more accurately than other fault detection methods. Practical implications The proposed EMD-SE-PCA method has high level of accuracy and efficiency. It can be used in monitoring the health of a spacecraft, detecting the anomaly and fault, avoiding them timely and efficiently. Also, the EMD-SE-PCA method could be further applied for monitoring the health of other equipment (e.g. attitude control and orbit control system) in spacecraft and satellites. Originality/value The paper provides a data-driven method EMD-SE-PCA to be applied in the field of practical health monitoring, which could discover the occurrence of anomaly or fault timely and efficiently and is very useful for spacecraft health diagnosis.