Information-Theoretic Channel Selection and Spatiotemporal Deep Learning for Early Fault Detection in Microsatellite Thermal Control Systems

Early fault detection in microsatellite thermal control systems (TCS) faces fundamental challenges: high-dimensional redundant telemetry channels, overlapping multi-scale periodicities that obscure anomaly signatures, and severely limited daily data downlink (1–2 passes per day) that restricts the temporal window for diagnosis. Existing data-driven approaches either rely on supervised learning, requiring labeled fault data that are scarce in practice, or employ univariate analysis that fails to capture inter-sensor spatial correlations. To address these limitations, this paper introduces a hybrid framework integrating information-theoretic feature selection and spatiotemporal deep learning. The Generalized Maximum Information Coefficient (GMIC) quantifies nonlinear dependencies between temperature channels for key channel selection, reducing dimensionality by 82% while preserving diagnostic information. A dual-level Seasonal Trend Decomposition (STL) method disentangles orbital-periodic dynamics from diurnal cycles, effectively isolating distinct thermal characteristics at multiple timescales. Each decomposed component is modeled using Convolutional Neural Network–Long Short-Term Memory (CNN-LSTM) networks to capture spatiotemporal dependencies for accurate temperature prediction. An adaptive threshold-based weighted error fusion mechanism enables early fault detection within a single day of telemetry data. Experimental validation on real satellite telemetry data demonstrates that the proposed framework achieves high-precision fault detection across multiple fault types using a minimal set of temperature channels, significantly outperforming existing benchmarks in both prediction accuracy and detection reliability.