Structure-Aware Unsupervised Anomaly Detection for Spacecraft Telemetry with Adaptive EVT Thresholding

Abstract

Operational anomaly detection in spacecraft telemetry typically requires labeled historical anomalies or extended warm-up periods. These requirements are rarely met in practice. We propose an unsupervised, deployment-ready framework that produces predictions from the second month of operation without any labels, prior fault knowledge, or mission-specific tuning. The approach combines incremental monthly retraining, statistical model selection, and adaptive Extreme Value Theory (EVT) thresholding for false alarm control. On the ESA Anomalies Dataset (ESA-AD), it achieves $F_{0.5}=0.700$ on Mission~1 and $F_{0.5}=0.698$ on Mission~2 under strict chronological evaluation.