Onboard Planning and Scheduling Autonomy within the Scope of the FireBird Mission

Abstract

For most low orbiting earth observation satellite missions, the timeline is generated on- ground and during dedicated uplink sessions the corresponding tele-commands are sent to the spacecraft. Bene�ts of this approach are easy maintainability of the complex planning software and quick response times to customer input. However this approach has two major drawbacks: On the one hand the spacecraft behavior is not completely predictable in terms of constraining resources, which means that even detailed modeling requires margins for the on-board resources within the on-ground scheduling algorithms. On the other hand, the reaction time to onboard detected events includes at least the two upcoming ground station contacts, since data downlink and evaluation, (re-)planning and tele-command uplink have to be awaited before the spacecraft can perform new activities. This paper describes the �nal design and use cases of VAMOS, an experiment of DLR/GSOC, which will be part of the FireBird mission. VAMOS consists of a combined onboard / on-ground planning system, which resolves the above mentioned drawbacks by supplying limited onboard autonomy to the satellite, retaining the bene�ts of a ground based planning system as far as possible.