1. The settlement that had to keep itself alive

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars returns as the recalled work because the early colony must maintain its own life support through dust storms and communication gaps with Earth. The desktop faces a smaller version of the same problem: keep the platform alive and useful when the home link is unavailable.

This entry defines success and failure for the long-duration autonomy without ground contact test.

2. Minimum success

The test passes if:

  • The platform remains within power, thermal, and attitude limits for every case in the matrix.
  • Critical services continue without interruption through single-orbit outages.
  • Minor faults during outage are detected and recovered locally.
  • Logs and telemetry are preserved well enough to reconstruct events after contact resumes.
  • Contact recovery is clean: the platform responds to ground commands and downlinks a coherent status.
  • No autonomous action creates a condition that ground cannot understand or override.

This minimum says the desktop can be left alone for routine LEO gaps.

3. Full success

A stronger result would add:

  • Multi-orbit outages are handled without service degradation.
  • The platform anticipates and prevents degradation, for example by preemptively migrating loads from a warming cell.
  • Housekeeping tasks are scheduled and executed autonomously without conflicts.
  • Telemetry compression and prioritization reduce downlink burden while preserving diagnostic value.
  • Performance during the test matches or improves predictions from simulation.

This stronger result supports a claim that the desktop can operate autonomously for extended periods, not just survive blackouts.

4. Failure modes

The test fails if any of the following occur:

  • A critical service is lost during a quiet orbit or eclipse case.
  • Power or thermal limits are exceeded.
  • A fault during outage is not detected or not recovered locally.
  • Logs are lost, corrupted, or insufficient to reconstruct events.
  • The platform enters a state that ground cannot recover within one contact pass.
  • Autonomous housekeeping tasks conflict and cause resource exhaustion.
  • Contact recovery is delayed or requires special procedures.

Each failure mode points to a fix in scheduling, FDIR, thermal/power management, or logging policy.

5. What this changes

  • The long-duration autonomy without ground contact test has clear pass and fail criteria.
  • The criteria separate survival from graceful self-management.
  • The next entry will close the test arc.