PHOENIX: Fine-Tuned SLM-Powered Autonomous Satellite Lifetime Extension via Predictive Self-Healing and Multi-Agent AI Recovery
This study addresses the premature failure of low Earth orbit CubeSats caused by undetected faults during communication blackout periods. The authors propose a space-ground collaborative autonomous fault-recovery framework: a fine-tuned small language model (SLM) equipped with a memory-augmented mechanism is deployed on an onboard embedded platform (Aethero NxN-ECM) to enable continuous monitoring and autonomous reasoning over sensor data; meanwhile, a ground-based multi-agent system generates repair commands during brief communication windows and leverages a denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM) to synthesize scarce fault data, thereby enhancing training efficacy. This approach represents the first integration of memory-augmented SLMs with multi-agent cooperative recovery, achieving significant improvements in fault detection accuracy and in-orbit recovery efficiency on the ESA 14-year anomaly detection benchmark dataset comprising 76 telemetry channels and 118 annotated faults.