Session
Advanced Technologies Research & Academia 1
Location
Salt Palace Convention Center, Salt Lake City, UT
Abstract
Low Earth orbit is increasingly crowded, and a growing share of it is flown by universities and small operators. These teams must detect and respond to on-orbit anomalies with far less staff, expertise, and tooling than large operators, and a single missed anomaly can end a mission. We present COMET, a ground-based operator agent that helps a small team both detect anomalies and diagnose them. COMET pairs a learned detector with a retrieval-augmented diagnosis stage. An LSTM autoencoder flags anomalous telemetry windows, and a language model explains each one against the mission’s own documentation, procedures, and prior operational records. Because the detector is trained on a mission’s own telemetry and the diagnosis is grounded in its own documents, an organization can build an agent tailored to its spacecraft, before launch and during operations. The agent is advisory rather than autonomous, and every output is traceable back to the telemetry and documents that produced it. We describe the design and a proof-of-concept implementation, and evaluate COMET on a public benchmark of simulated multivariate spacecraft telemetry with injected anomalies. The detector recovers most of the labeled anomalies, favoring recall so that few are missed, and for a flagged event the diagnosis stage produces a traceable, documentation-grounded explanation. These results show the pipeline is feasible and its outputs auditable, a step toward reducing operator burden as deployments grow.
Document Type
Event
Included in
Toward Trainable AI Agents for Satellite Operations
Salt Palace Convention Center, Salt Lake City, UT
Low Earth orbit is increasingly crowded, and a growing share of it is flown by universities and small operators. These teams must detect and respond to on-orbit anomalies with far less staff, expertise, and tooling than large operators, and a single missed anomaly can end a mission. We present COMET, a ground-based operator agent that helps a small team both detect anomalies and diagnose them. COMET pairs a learned detector with a retrieval-augmented diagnosis stage. An LSTM autoencoder flags anomalous telemetry windows, and a language model explains each one against the mission’s own documentation, procedures, and prior operational records. Because the detector is trained on a mission’s own telemetry and the diagnosis is grounded in its own documents, an organization can build an agent tailored to its spacecraft, before launch and during operations. The agent is advisory rather than autonomous, and every output is traceable back to the telemetry and documents that produced it. We describe the design and a proof-of-concept implementation, and evaluate COMET on a public benchmark of simulated multivariate spacecraft telemetry with injected anomalies. The detector recovers most of the labeled anomalies, favoring recall so that few are missed, and for a flagged event the diagnosis stage produces a traceable, documentation-grounded explanation. These results show the pipeline is feasible and its outputs auditable, a step toward reducing operator burden as deployments grow.
