The CONSERT operations planning process for the Rosetta mission

Kurzfassung

In the scope of European Space Agency's Rosetta mission, the COmet Nucleus Sounding Experiment by Radio wave Transmission (CONSERT) has sounded the deep interior of the nucleus of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The CONSERT experiment main objective was to image the interior of the comet nucleus. This bi-static radar experiment with instrument units on-board both, the Rosetta main spacecraft and its lander Philae, requires a specific geometric configuration to operate and produce fruitful science data. Thus, these geometric constraints involve mainly the position and orientation of Rosetta and Philae. From the operations planning point of view, the mission constraints imposed observation slots to be defined far before their execution, while the comet shape, spacecraft trajectories and landing site were still unknown. The CONSERT instrument operations scheduling had to be designed jointly for Rosetta and Philae platforms, based on different time scales and planning concepts. We present the methods and tools we developed to cope with the complexity of this planning process. These operations planning concepts allowed handling the complexity of multiple platform operations and the lack of prior knowledge of the observed target.