Publications

On the energy consequences of information for spacecraft systems

Lyke, James; Mee, Jesse; Edwards, Arthur; Pineda, Andrew; DeBenedictis, Erik; Frank, Michael P.

Conventional wisdom in the spacecraft domain is that on-orbit computation is expensive, and thus, information is traditionally funneled to the ground as directly as possible. The explosion of information due to larger sensors, the advancements of Moore's law, and other considerations lead us to revisit this practice. In this article, we consider the trade-off between computation, storage, and transmission, viewed as an energy minimization problem.