ASTREA: Introducing Agentic Intelligence for Orbital Thermal Autonomy

Abstract: This paper presents ASTREA, the first agentic system deployed on flight-heritage hardware (TRL 9) for autonomous spacecraft operations. Using thermal control as a representative use case, we integrate a resource-constrained LLM agent with a reinforcement learning controller in an asynchronous architecture tailored for space-qualified platforms. Ground experiments show that LLM-guided supervision improves thermal stability and reduces violations, confirming the feasibility of combining semantic reasoning with adaptive control under hardware constraints. However, on-orbit validation aboard the International Space Station (ISS) reveals performance degradation caused by inference latency mismatched with the rapid thermal cycles characteristic of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites. These results highlight both the opportunities and current limitations of agentic LLM-based systems in real flight environments, providing practical design guidelines for future space autonomy.