Automating ESA’s Planetary Missions: From Concept to Conclusion

Abstract

ESA’s Solar and Planetary Missions Division currently operates four missions Cluster, Venus Express, Mars Express and Rosetta. As all these missions have been flying for many years their operations are very regular and the ground station passes are conducted according to a limited set of routine procedures. Certain well understood anomalies can also be handled in the same way as routine operations through isolated and well tested procedures. ESA wants to avoid overloading the spacecraft controllers with time critical manual operations and assist them as much as possible by conducting all or some procedures with an automation system. This is especially the case since Rosetta resumed operations after exiting hibernation in January 2014 and passes are now conducted in parallel with Mars Express and Venus Express. An automation system which conducts these routine procedures in a safe, reliable and repeatable way reduces human error and ensures that the controller has more time to conduct and analyse aspects which fall outside the daily routine. Facilitating one controller to supervise passes on more than one spacecraft can also help to reduce operational costs. This paper will discuss the challenges arising when developing and implementing any automation system. One of the key aspects is that it must support transition to and from manual operations in a safe way in case a problem or unexpected situation occurs, because it is impossible to foresee all possible failures and/or anomalies and deal with them in an autonomous way. This goes hand in hand with the second aspect that the change-over between automated and manual operations must be quick and not require re-start/reconfiguration of the whole system. On top of that it is important to find a balance between maximising visibility of the system to allow debugging and failure recovery and providing a high level overview for the operators to quickly check the state of the pass conduction. Since June 2013, Venus Express has been using an automation system based on the Manufacturing and Operations Information System (MOIS) interfacing to the mission control system software of ESA SCOS-2000® including the mission specific extension developed by SCISYS. The automation system complements the Mission Planning System (MPS) and is used for routine interaction with the spacecraft: setup ground segment subsystems, manage links with ground stations, spacecraft health checks, dump of housekeeping and payload telemetry, routine commanding and logging of activities. The