TRUTHS Ground Segment to improve confidence in climate change forecasts
- Paper number
GLOC-2023,T,IP,x74998
- Author
Mrs. Alexandra Gravereaux, Telespazio, United Kingdom
- Year
2023
- Abstract
Telespazio UK is helping to challenge climate change through the TRUTHS mission, which will develop a satellite to establish an SI-traceable space-based climate and calibration observing system to improve confidence in climate change forecasts. It will use a hyper-spectral imager to measure incoming solar radiation and outgoing reflected radiation. The TRUTHS mission will gather extremely accurate measurements of energy coming into the Earth from the Sun and light reflected off the surface of the Earth, in order to help understand both the changes that cause global warming, and humanity’s impact on the planet, which will ultimately support faster and better decision-making on climate strategies. The European Space Agency TRUTHS Earth Watch mission concept was conceived by the UK’s National Physical Laboratory and includes a large consortium. Telespazio UK have been involved in the Ground Segment team in defining the requirements and necessary architecture for the mission. In particular, the Telespazio UK team was responsible for the Flight Operations Segment (FOS), encompassing the Mission Control System and Telemetry, Tracking and Control (TT&C) Ground Stations, tasked with monitoring and controlling the satellite, flight dynamics, mission planning and mission operations simulation functions. The mission-planning element of the ground segment must be iterated between the FOS and the Payload Data Ground Segment (PDGS) in order to manage the mission requests within the mission constraints. The TRUTHS mission is being designed to maximise the calibration opportunities for a number of existing and future EO missions, which requires a powerful and extensive simulation exercise that takes into account predicted satellite positions in a future timeframe. The need for continued simulation runs as an input to mission planning for observation prioritisation will be key. The FOS will be required to dictate the cadence of that planning process within the confines of the operational process. Automation of key processes will be important to minimise the impact on the mission planning lead times. The PDGS definition proposes a more user-centric approach. The concept includes highly scalable, on-demand processing and data caching in both highly controlled and experimental environments. The use of the data for long term calibration leads to requirements on traceability and verifiability that will require additions to the security model applied to data management. Such changes have ripple effects through various parts of the architecture (including data circulation, storage, archive and monitoring), but also significant benefits for the development and integration of new algorithms and processing techniques.
- Abstract document
- Manuscript document
(absent)