Planning the Commissioning of a Multi-Payload Mission

Abstract

The Science Operations Centre (SOC) based at ESTEC has responsibility for the science operations for a number of interplanetary missions. To accomplish this task a generic planning strategy utilising a set of standardised tools has been developed. The first operational involvement of the SOC for each of these missions will be during the commissioning phase, where it will be responsible for the consolidation and validation of payload operation requests from multiple instrument teams into a time-tagged set of operations. This paper will focus on the preparation for the commissioning of the Rosetta Mission. The Rosetta spacecraft will be commissioned in two phases, the second of which will include the running of mission scenarios prepared by the SOC. The most challenging of these scenarios from a scienceoperations perspective is the “pointing scenario” as, in addition to instrument operation requests, the payload teams will also request specific spacecraft attitudes. The combined requests for each payload are formalised within a so-called “Scenario Parameter List” (SPL), where common pointing requests between payloads have been grouped into observations. This paper outlines the preparation of the Rosetta pointing scenario, scheduled toward the end of this year. First, it will tackle the identification of spacecraft and payload constraints, how they impact instrument operation requests and how potential conflicts are resolved by the SOC. Second, it will examine the resolution of geometric and environmental constraints with the pointing requests received from the payload teams. Finally it will review the consolidation process of all instrument requests into an integrated timeline and the synchronization of this timeline with the pointing requests to produce a single Payload Operation Request (POR). In addition to the points outlined above, lessons learned throughout the planning process are noted as are the experiences gained on other missions running in parallel to the current planning activity – in particular the Smart-1 lunar mission.