Satellite telemetry data contains satellite status information, and ground-monitoring personnel need to promptly detect satellite anomalies from these data. This paper takes the satellite power subsystem as an example and presents a reliable anomaly detection method. Due to the lack of abnormal data, the autoencoder is a powerful method for unsupervised anomaly detection. This study proposes a novel stage-training denoising autoencoder (ST-DAE) that trains the features, in stages. This novel method has better reconstruction capabilities in comparison to common autoencoders, sparse autoencoders, and denoising autoencoders. Meanwhile, a cluster-based anomaly threshold determination method is proposed. In this study, specific methods were designed to evaluate the autoencoder performance in three perspectives. Experiments were carried out on real satellite telemetry data, and the results showed that the proposed ST-DAE generally outperformed the autoencoders, in comparison.

The satellite power subsystem is responsible for all power supply in a satellite, and is an important component of it. The system’s performance has a direct impact on the operations of other systems as well as the satellite’s lifespan. Sequence to sequence (seq2seq) learning has recently advanced, gaining even more power in evaluating complicated and large-scale data. The potential of the seq2seq model in detecting anomalies in the satellite power subsystem is investigated in this work. A seq2seq-based scheme is given, with a thorough comparison of different neural-network cell types and levels of data smoothness. Three specific approaches were created to evaluate the seq2seq model performance, taking into account the unsupervised learning mechanism. The findings reveal that a CNN-based seq2seq with attention model under suitable data-smoothing conditions has a better ability to detect anomalies in the satellite power subsystem.