Planning Area Coverage with Low Priority

Abstract

There exist multiple papers about how to plan satellite image acquisitions in order to cover an area of interest which is larger than one image swath. All of these consider the case that the to-be-covered area is of greatest interest and that the resulting plan may be executed without disturbance. Within the EnMAP mission however, images of higher priority are requested such that they are acquired using one pass only. Requests to cover a whole area are reserved for the background mission, which has lowest priority and is introduced to fulfill secondary mission goals on a longer time horizon. Planning for the background mission must therefore take into account that any time before sending the commands to the spacecraft, new requests may be received, whose acquisitions block planned acquisitions of the area coverage. In this paper we describe the different options the EnMAP Mission Planning team considers to handle this scenario.