Work

Discovering outliers in the Mars Express thermal power consumption patterns

Year: 2021
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: The Mars Express (MEX) spacecraft has been orbiting Mars since 2004. The operators need to constantly monitor its behavior and handle sporadic deviations (outliers) from the expected patterns of measurements of quantities that the satellite is sending to Earth. In this paper, we analyze the patterns of the electrical power consumption of MEX’s thermal subsystem, that maintains the spacecraft’s temperature at the desired level. The consumption is not constant, but should be roughly periodic in the short term, with the period that corresponds to one orbit around Mars. By using long short-term memory neural networks, we show that the consumption pattern is more irregular than expected, and successfully detect such irregularities, opening possibility for automatic outlier detection on MEX in the future.
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3187773455
FWCI: 0.231
Cites: 25
Cited by: 3
Related to: 10