Concept for generic agile, reactive optical link planning

Abstract

The paper presents our concept of a generic, flexible, highly responsive, evolvable end-to-end link planning system, which enables its users to modify the planning and corresponding operational products even on late notice. The main challenges of optical communication, the orbit and pointing accuracy, and the influence of atmospheric weather conditions result in the need for having an automatically triggered reactive incremental planning immediately upon reception of new input (e.g., orbit or cloud prediction updates) instead of planning runs at fixed points in time following a predefined pattern. For direct-to-Earth communication, the local weather conditions are a major challenge which may lead to ground station link outages. This is where ground station clusters with a high site diversity come into play. To address the risk of data loss as well as increase the availability and resilience, the automated ingestion of information from the ground terminals with an ad-hoc, reactive re-planning is one possible solution. In this sense, cloud forecasts and statistics can be considered and integrated into the planning model and processes. We outline how we aim to integrate atmospheric condition monitoring concepts, that we already have implemented for Earth observation acquisition planning purposes, into our generic link planning tool suite. Our tool can be used for different types of missions. It shall evolve to an automated link planning system based on the Reactive Planning Framework combined with PintaOnWeb, a frontend for visual support, modifications, and analysis.