Toward Deployable Satellite Anomaly Detection: A Benchmark Study on Large-Scale ESA-ADB Telemetry

Andrea Nguyen, Dafne Rozenberg, Yeying Zhu, Peng Hu

Satellite anomaly detection is essential for maintaining mission reliability and spacecraft health, yet remains challenging due to the high-dimensional, irregular, and imbalanced nature of spacecraft telemetry data. This paper presents a systematic benchmark study evaluating supervised and unsupervised anomaly detection approaches on the large-scale ESA-ADB dataset across two mission settings of varying temporal scales. Supervised models, including Multiscale Convolutional Neural Networks (Multiscale CNN), Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN), and Graph Attention Networks (GAT), are compared against unsupervised methods, namely Elliptic Envelope (EE) and Empirical Cumulative Distribution Function-based Outlier Detection (ECOD). Beyond detection performance, we rigorously analyze computational runtime and scalability, which are critical for practical deployment in spacecraft operations. Results show that supervised models achieve stronger overall performance, while unsupervised methods offer competitive precision with significantly lower computational overhead. These findings underscore a fundamental trade-off between detection capacity and operational efficiency, offering practical guidance for mission engineers designing scalable satellite health monitoring systems.