Design and Implementation of a New Generic Concept for the Science Operations Planning of ESA Planetary Missions

Paper number

IAC-05-A3.P.10

Author

Mr. Mehran Sarkarati, European Space Agency (ESA), The Netherlands

Coauthor

Mr. Miguel Almeida, European Space Agency (ESA)/ESTEC, The Netherlands

Coauthor

Mr. David Frew, European Space Agency (ESA)/ESTEC, The Netherlands

Year

2005

Abstract

One of the major tasks of the Science Operation Centre of the European Space Agency is the planning and coordinating operational activities of the scientific payloads of current and future ESA planetary missions such as Rosetta, SMART-1 and Venus Express.
To fulfil the scientific objectives of these missions and to achieve the optimal scientific output, it is necessary to analyse the possible science opportunities in each phase of the mission and to select and prioritize the operations of the scientific payloads with respect to the corresponding scientific goals.

The Science Operations Planning System (SOPS) is the name of a new system, which is being developed at the Research and Scientific Support Division of ESA, to implement a generic and mission-independent concept for science operations planning. The reference implementation of the concept is based on the ongoing ESA mission SMART-1. It will help the science operation engineers by providing them with tools and information to ease and speed the process of decision making and planning.
SOPS is composed of two major groups of components:

• The first group, the so called knowledge base, are components, which provide the infrastructure to persist all the relevant information about the operations of scientific payloads and various sophisticated interfaces to access this information.

• The second group of components are a number of tools and clients, which access and use the information, contained in the knowledge base, to carry out different functionalities such as analyzing/visualizing the possible science opportunities for scientific payloads, archiving performed payload operations and generating interface documents and files for other existing planning tools.

In this paper an overview of the new generic concept will be presented and the architectural design of the SOAP will be discussed in detail.

Abstract document

IAC-05-A3.P.10.pdf

Manuscript document

IAC-05-A3.P.10.pdf (🔒 authorized access only).

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