Mission Planning
From dedicated mission planning towards Multi-mission facilities.
DEIMOS Space has a consolidated background experience in mission planning and scheduling subsystems, particularly in the frame of the European Space Agency (ESA) missions. Mission planning and scheduling requires the detailed analysis of the different available resources to fulfil the mission objective, the associated constraints, the strategy adopted by the Mission Management for resource utilisation and their optimisation criteria. This analysis is to be accomplished while satisfying the possible customer requests to the maximum extent. In addition, such a process involves conflict detection and resolution mechanisms, so as to outline the operations plan. This plan is then further refined and converted into the operational schedule, which defines in detail the use of the mission resources.
DEIMOS is developing and maintaining mission-planning facilities for most of the current ESA Earth Observation missions. The new developments, instead of being completely specific for a given mission, are now built using generic components, valid for any mission, that are used to create the specific functions. This approach is being used successfully in GOCE and Aeolus using the infrastructure originally implemented for CryoSat. These Multi-mission developments allow for greater productivity, having more reliable systems with reduced cost.
Depending on the mission characteristics there are two basic ways for planning the spacecraft payload:
- Using a reference plan, that specified at each time how the payload should be operator. This reference plan not only details the nominal operations but also the required calibration or maintenance tasks.
- Based on user requests, asking for dedicated observations.
In many cases both mechanisms coexist and must be combined respect taking into account the constraints imposed by the spacecraft.
For the first type of planning DEIMOS is responsible for the development of the Reference Planning Facilities for CryoSat, GOCE and Aeolus, as well as the maintenance and evolution of the ROP Generation Tool for ENVISAT.
For the second case DEIMOS is harmonising the existing Mission Planning systems specific for ENVISAT and ALOS missions, creating a Multi Mission platform for Mission Planning and Analysis System. This implementation will be the basis for a reusable platform for GMES Sentinels Missions.
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