1. When the station must interpret silence

Stanisław Lem’s Solaris returns as the recalled work because the scientists must keep working when the ocean does not answer their signals in any expected way. The desktop’s communications resilience test is similar: it must show that the platform can function when the ground does not answer, and that it can resume meaningful contact when the channel returns.

This entry defines success and failure for the communications resilience test.

2. Minimum success

The test passes if:

  • Critical health and safety telemetry reaches ground through every single-link-failure case without loss.
  • The platform detects primary-link degradation and switches to a fallback link within policy time limits.
  • No autonomous link switch causes a violation of regulatory or operational constraints.
  • Buffer overflow does not cause loss of critical data during any outage case.
  • The platform returns to nominal communications after the stress is removed.
  • Ground receives a coherent log of autonomous decisions when contact resumes.

This minimum says the desktop can survive common communications failures.

3. Full success

A stronger result would add:

  • Payload data is also preserved through single-link failures by using store-and-forward or alternate links.
  • Link adaptation maintains useful throughput through interference without switching.
  • The platform predicts an impending link failure and preemptively switches before data is lost.
  • Recovery is transparent to external customers.
  • Test data supports claims of flight readiness for resilient communications.

This stronger result supports a claim that the desktop can operate through realistic communications degradation.

4. Failure modes

The test fails if any of the following occur:

  • Critical telemetry is lost during a single-link failure.
  • The platform fails to detect a degraded link and keeps transmitting into it.
  • A link switch violates policy or causes a regulatory issue.
  • Buffer management causes corruption or loss of ordered data.
  • The platform thrashes between links, wasting power and losing data.
  • Ground cannot understand why the platform made its decisions.
  • The platform does not return to nominal communications after the stress is removed.

Each failure mode points to a fix in link monitoring, policy, buffer management, or logging.

5. What this changes

  • The communications resilience test has clear pass and fail criteria.
  • The criteria separate survival from graceful degradation and recovery.
  • The next entry will close the test arc.