Mission Planning

Abstract

Mission planning plays a key role in the operations of a spacecraft, as it ensures that all resources are available, used to an optimal level and the goals of the mission are achieved. There are various ways how to define the exact meaning of mission planning, and different operations centers throughout the world use different definitions. Within this book, we will consider mission planning as the task of preparing, organising and planning all relevant activities that happen during the mission, on-board as well as on ground. It is therefore distinct from mission analysis or mission preparation tasks, which serve to analyse and define a mission beforehand and provide the necessary means to execute the mission. As such, the responsibility of mission planning is to deliver the plan in form of a timeline or so-called Sequence of Events (SoE) right in time for the relevant activities (e.g. before uplink to the spacecraft). This might happen only once (e.g. the actions performed by the lander on an asteroid) or very frequently (e.g. an earth-observation satellite fed with customer orders). The plan has to be conflict free, i.e. can under the given on-board and ground constraints be executed on the spacecraft and on ground without any errors. In addition, the timeline should maximize the usage of available resources and ensure that the goals of the mission are eventually met. The overall scope of planned activities that falls into the responsibility of mission planning varies a lot from mission to mission. It can range from a very limited responsibility, e.g. planning only simple transmitter switching for groundstation contacts, to almost full responsibility for all space-craft commands including ground station scheduling. In this chapter, we will introduce the key concepts for designing and operating a mission planning system and present some examples of planning systems for currently active missions at the German Space Operations Center (GSOC).