Ocean Worlds represent one of the best chances for extra-terrestrial life in our solar system. A new mission concept must be developed to explore these oceans. This mission would require traversing the 10s of km thick icy shell and releasing a submersible into the ocean below. During the transit of the icy shell and the exploration of the ocean, the vehicle(s) would be out of contact with Earth for weeks or potentially months at a time. During this time the vehicle must have sufficient autonomy to locate and study scientific targets of interest. One such target of interest is hydrothermal venting. We have previously developed an autonomous nested search method to locate and investigate sources of hydrothermal venting by locating local maxima in hydrothermal vent emissions. In this work we demonstrate this approach on board an OceanServer Iver2 AUV in Chesapeake Bay, MD using simulated sensor data from a hydrothermal plume model. This represents the first step towards the deployment of this approach in conditions analogous to those that we might expect on an Ocean World.

We present here one of the first research efforts conducted at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to implement on a single chip (Xilinx Zynq) all the functionality necessary to control a NASA instrument, namely a Fourier Transform Spectrometer (FTS) that is proposed for deployment on future missions to Jupiter's moon Europa. The system requires custom logic to process the data delivered by the instrument, and software, to perform floating-point operations and to drive the interface with the main spacecraft computer. Three features are central in our SoC FTS implementation: (1) Efficiency, as the system achieves a high data processing throughput at relatively low power consumption, (2) Adaptivity, as the system can be configured from Earth based on the data observed while exploring a priori unknown space environments and (3) Fault-Tolerance, as the system needs to operate in the harsh radiation Jupiter magnetosphere where Europa orbits.

We present here an integrated SoC platform, called APEX-SoC, that is aimed at speeding-up the design of next-generation space flight instruments avionics by providing a convenient infrastructure for hardware and software based science data processing. We use a case-study drawn from the JPL Compositional Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (CIRIS) to illustrate the process of integrating instrument-dependent data acquisition and processing stages in this platform. In order to enable the use of APEX-SoC-based instruments in deep space missions, the platform implements Radiation Hardening By Design (RHBD) techniques and offers support for instantiating multiple processing stages that can be used at runtime to increase reliability or performance, based on the requirements of the mission at each particular stage. Finally, in the specific case of CIRIS, the data processing includes a stage to cope with radiation affecting the instrument photo-detector.