NASA NTRS2021
As the Mars Curiosity Rover transmits data to the JPL Ground Data System (GDS), it frequently observes data loss and corruption, requiring re-transmits from the rover and Ground Data System Analysts (GDSA) to monitor the downlink process. As new missions are launched, the GDSA team redistributes analysts to these new missions, causing shortages in previous missions. The GDSA team can significantly benefit from the automation and optimization of the downlink process of telemetry data. In fact, there is a need for a better understanding of why the data is corrupted, so that the GDSA team can best determine the root cause of the issues in the GDS. This paper presents machine learning and deep learning based approaches to automate and optimize the detection of data loss. We first created a pipeline to automatically accumulate data from the telemetry databases (MAROS, Telemetry Data Storage, and GDS Elastic Search Database) in the downlink process. With our newly created datasets, we perform feature selection to supplement the GDSA understanding of the downlink process and provide supplemental analysis on the importance of different features. We implement various machine learning and deep learning based models, including support vector machines, ensemble methods, and deep neural networks and evaluate their accuracies in identifying whether a downlink process is complete or incomplete. We utilize fast hyperparameter optimization methods that allow our models to quickly be re-trained, allowing them to quickly be tuned and optimized on daily incoming data in real time. This hyperparameter optimization also allows our methods to be quickly integrated into other JPL missions. Our results show that our best-performing machine learning and deep learning based models outperform the existing GDSA detection software by 6 accuracy points and can aid analysts by providing insights into the data accountability problem. Since these various machine learning and deep learning approaches vary significantly in interpretability, we provide a discussion on the tradeoffs between their performance and trustworthiness in helping detect issues in data transmission.