Information Technology Enablers for Deep Space Exploration

Technology innovation has always been the engine that has enabled new space mission capabilities. For interplanetary space exploration, nowhere has this been more evident in recent years than in the field of information technology that itself spans a huge breath of underlying sub-disciplines, such as flight computing, reliable software engineering, autonomous systems, robotic vision, and advanced networking for disruption tolerant communications, to name a few. This talk will highlight a few recent space mission successes, such as in the robotic exploration of Mars, and the underlying information systems technologies that made them possible. The talk will conclude with an eye to the future, including some possible future mission directions and space technology research challenges that lie ahead, and where academia can play a role.

Speaker: Larry Bergman, JPL