Industrial information integration in deep space exploration and exploitation: Architecture and technology

Abstract

Recently, China and the United States have achieved remarkable success in aerospace science and technology over the years. Space has become another field of competition in the technological advancement of various countries. Through space missions, space tourism, moon and Mars exploration, China and the United States can demonstrate the sophistication of their technologies to the public and audiences around the world. Despite the competitiveness between the big countries, space missions and deep space exploration and exploitation have provided a lot of deep and orbital space information that is beneficial not only for the next space mission but also for enhancing technological development for other domestic uses. Therefore, space industrial information integration (III), or Space III, connecting IoT to form the Internet of Planets, is critically important for deep space explorations. However, few articles have reviewed the existing technologies of space. We are one of the few groups to perform an extensive review, research the space explorations and divide the space information integration systematically based on the information architecture and technologies in the space industries. In this paper, we propose that III can be divided into three different architectures: data, technology, and application, whereas space technology can be divided into six areas. This review is important not only in formulating research in technological integration but also in determining the proposed architecture to facilitate a further extension of applications to large-scale and complex problems in the space industries in the future.