Peepholes in Orbit: When Black Boxes Learn to Explain Themselves
Alarm. That is the easy part. A satellite telemetry model notices something unusual in a reaction wheel, raises a flag, and reports an anomaly score. Wonderful. The machine has shouted. Now comes the harder question: what exactly should the spacecraft do with that shout? For ground-based analytics, a black-box anomaly score can be tolerable. An engineer can inspect logs, replay telemetry, compare signals, argue with the model, and eventually decide whether the alert was meaningful. In orbit, especially inside an autonomous Fault Detection, Isolation and Recovery system, that leisurely ritual becomes less charming. The system may need to react before a human has time to read the dashboard, let alone form a committee. ...