PINTA - one Tool to plan them all

Kurzfassung

In the recent years, the “Program for INteractive Timeline Analysis” PINTA, developed at the German Space Operation Center (GSOC), was continuously improved and experienced several evolution steps. PINTA is a GUI application running on Windows-based computer systems, whose main purpose is to serve as the anchor tool for a mission planning operation’s engineer when generating, modifying or analysing a mission timeline. This is supported by calling automatic planning algorithms of the embedded generic planning library “PLAnningTOol” PLATO, using input of the embedded orbit propagation and event calculation library “SpaceCraft Orbit and GroundTrack Analysis Tool” SCOTA, or its expandability through plugins. PINTA is the generic basis of many semi-automated mission planning systems for past, current and future spacecraft projects operated at GSOC. It is used or has been used for the missions Grace, TET-OOV, FireBird, Grace-FollowOn, Eu:CROPIS and is currently prepared for CubeL. Furthermore, PINTA serves as the timeline analysis tool for validating the TerraSAR-X/TanDEM-X mission planning system. The variety of use cases was further extended to support Launch and Early Orbit Phases (LEOPs) in its special “SoEEditor” configuration as the new generic editing tool for the so-called “Sequence of Events”. It was successfully used for the satellites Biros, HAG-1, PAZ, Grace-FollowOn 1 & Grace-FollowOn 2, Eu:Cropis, EDRS-C and is currently in preparation for EnMAP. In addition to LEOP’s, the SoEEditor was also capable of supporting the constellation maneuvers for the TerraSAR-X/TanDEM-X mission. Besides all these use cases, the paper at hand will especially describe how PINTA was even further extended to not only tackle spacecraft-based but also ground-based scheduling. On the one hand it serves as an “On-Call Tool” to support the on-call shifts by automatically generating conflict-free role-based shift plans for all subsystems by considering various constraints like person outages, working hours, role-conflicts, etc… The plan can then be further adapted manually to cope with user change-requests. On the other hand it is used as a “Multi-Mission-Control-Room-and-pass-Scheduler” (MuMiCoRoS) to coordinate the ground-station booking of all LEO (low-earth orbit) satellites: TerraSAR-X, TanDEM-X, TET, Biros, Grace-FollowOn 1 & 2 and Eu:CROPIS. In order to avoid ground-station and operator conflicts between the missions, an automatic and combined plan for all satellites is generated which can then be further modified manually if necessary. As another use case, PINTA (a.k.a. GPT; Galileo Planning Tool) supports the Galileo Service Operation (GSOp). The planning process involves three timelines: a Short-Term Plan (STP), covering the next ten days, two Mid-Term Plans (MTP) for the Operational (OPE) and the Validation (VAL) chain), covering the next 15 weeks, and a Long-Term Plan (LTP), covering the next 15 months. The activities in these timeframes cover all subsystems of Galileo: Flight Ops, Control segment, Mission segment, remote sites, service operations, hardware, software, hosting, network, etc ... In order to support the GSOp, numerous additional features, like importers, exporters, interfaces and plugins had to be added to PINTA.