Towards Generic Planning of Optical Links

Abstract

The paper at hand presents our concept for upcoming space-ground optical Mission Planning systems at DLR GSOC. In cooperation with TESAT we have more than 15 years of operational experience for optical links. We have thoroughly discussed challenges and needs of optical mission planning systems to enable potential customers for deployment of full end-to-end systems. While earlier systems such as TDP-1 (Technical Demonstration Project) or EDRS (European Data Relay System) had individual requirements and interfaces, the new system is capable to consider ad-hoc additional requirements and generic interfaces. This flexibility is a big step towards our goal of a fully interoperable control center infrastructure. We show in the paper at hand how the new concept will be implemented and validated. The developed architecture is based upon the "Program for INteractive Timeline Analysis" (PINTA). PINTA enables the User in this specific use case to manually schedule links from a set of precalculated visibilities and trigger an automated link export for both optical terminals (on ground and in orbit) for their execution. At first, PINTA will be used offline for scheduling the links of the new DLR optical ground station Almería; in the frame of the Global Optical Ground Station Network (GlobeON). The subsequent development step will result in embedding these functionalities in another architecture which builds upon the new generic interfaces, replacing PINTA with the GSOC's generic Reactive Planning framework and its frontend PintaOnWeb for visual support, modification and analysis. This tool suite will allow for automatically triggered incremental planning runs immediately upon reception of new input (e.g. orbit updates, spacecraft and ground station unavailability) instead of manually initiated runs or semi-automated planning at fixed intervals. Finally, more elaborated interactions with the spacecraft and ground station operations and the prediction as well as real-time information about local weather conditions are aimed to be included into the automated planning process.