Deterministic Predictive State (DPS) Architecture for High-Latency Interplanetary Command and Control

Abstract

Round-trip light-time delays between Earth and Mars routinely reach 20–40 minutes. Under these conditions conventional transactional databases and consensus protocols either lock up or time out. This paper describes a practical architecture that avoids the problem by running identical, bit-for-bit deterministic simulators on the ground and on the spacecraft. All calculations use software fixed-point arithmetic. Both sides share the same atomic-clock timeline (corrected for relativity) and the same sequence of pseudorandom seeds. When delayed telemetry arrives via DTN, the ground side rewinds its state to the timestamp of the data, merges the real measurements with CRDTs, and fast-forwards the simulation back to the present. Operators therefore work with a continuously updated predictive view that converges to the true spacecraft state once the data catch up. The method is restricted to fully deterministic workloads: trajectory propagation, attitude dynamics, power and thermal modelling, and resource scheduling.