  NASA's new age of space exploration augurs great promise for deep space
exploration missions whereby spacecraft should be independent, autonomous, and
smart. Nowadays NASA increasingly relies on the concepts of autonomic
computing, exploiting these to increase the survivability of remote missions,
particularly when human tending is not feasible. Autonomic computing has been
recognized as a promising approach to the development of self-managing
spacecraft systems that employ onboard intelligence and rely less on control
links. The Autonomic System Specification Language (ASSL) is a framework for
formally specifying and generating autonomic systems. As part of long-term
research targeted at the development of models for space exploration missions
that rely on principles of autonomic computing, we have employed ASSL to
develop formal models and generate functional prototypes for NASA missions.
This helps to validate features and perform experiments through simulation.
Here, we discuss our work on developing such missions with ASSL.
