GSOCs Planning Library: History, Generic Features and Lessons Learnt

Abstract

Mission Planning at GSOC started, in cooperation with other agencies, with manually triggered processes. Within the mission D-2, first experiences have been gathered with the Experiment Scheduling Program of the Marshall Space Flight Center. For succeeding missions, the interactive planning application Pinta has been developed, together with additional tools which support event calculation and automated planning using simple heuristics. A major step forward was the implementation of a fully automated planning system for TerraSAR-X, where it was in charge of the whole mission, including payload and bus. Soon this Mission Planning system had been extended to also include a second satellite and additional mission goals for the TanDEM-X mission. In preparation of a successor mission, desires of internal and external users and operators of the TerraSAR-X/TanDEM-X missions have been analyzed. Even though no successor mission for TerraSAR-X has been selected yet, the Mission Planning team evolved its planning libraries according to the outcome of this analysis and to respond to further lessons learnt, which had been gathered in different other missions throughout the years, such as FireBird, EDRS, Galileo and several LEOPs. This paper describes how GSOCs planning libraries evolved, presents the current status, and presents the current status. It discusses what generic features have proven beneficial, which features were less helpful, and describes obstacles which need to be considered in different missions. The paper concludes with an outlook on how the GSOC Mission Planning team prepares its systems for the future.