Abstract

Data acquisition in planetary remote sensing missions is influenced by complex environmental resource- and instrument-specific constraints. This impedes to perform observations at any given time during the mission and with any of the instruments composing the scientific payload. This article presents an approach to automatic scheduling of acquisition operations of a remote sensing instrument composing the scientific payload of a mission. The methodology first subdivides the long available observation time intervals into shorter segments and then performs a selection of them, producing an acquisition schedule, optimized with respect to scientific requirements, instrument characteristics, and mission constraints. The scheduling problem is modeled as a multiobjective optimization problem and solved by using Genetic Algorithms (GAs). GAs are able to efficiently explore the solution space by considering different competing objective functions, reaching high-quality solutions. These solutions represent different optimized tradeoffs among the considered instrument-specific quality metrics. The approach is demonstrated on the operations of Radar for Icy Moons Exploration (RIME), a radar sounder onboard Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer. The obtained results show a high potential of the proposed methodology.

Highlights

  • R EMOTE sensing instruments provide high-valuable data, characterizing the surface, composition and structure of the analyzed celestial body

  • We studied the real case of the operations planning and scheduling for the JUpiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) mission of the European Space Agency (ESA), which is focused on the analysis of the Jovian System and of Jupiter’s Icy Moons

  • We focused our attention on the observations of the Radar for Icy Moons Exploration (RIME), the radar sounder designed for JUpiter ICy moons Explorer (JUICE)

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Summary

Introduction

R EMOTE sensing instruments provide high-valuable data, characterizing the surface, composition and structure of the analyzed celestial body This is possible by exploiting the data acquired by the science payload designed for the considered mission and the related spacecraft. The management of acquisitions requires to consider a large number of complex constraints and specifications These include the scientific objectives associated with each instrument and the related requirements, the environmental conditions that may limit the observation capabilities of certain types of sensors, and the resources that are available on board the spacecraft (e.g., power, memory storage space, downlink data rate) that have to be shared among all the instruments composing the payload. The resources availabile for a mission and the trajectory to be followed by the spacecraft in the different phases of the mission are defined on the basis of the science objectives and the related operational requirements of the payload in the early stages of the mission design

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