Utilising Rosetta commonality to reduce mission operations cost for Mars Express

Abstract

The European Space Agency is preparing two major deep-space scientific missions for launch in 2003: Rosetta, a mission to comet P-Wirtanen, and Mars Express, a Mars Orbiter with a lander. In order to remain within the extremely tight budget available for the Mars Express ground segment development and operations, this mission will inherit and re-use as much as possible from what is developed and used for Rosetta. Although the two missions and spacecraft are very different from each other, the key to re-use of ground segment elements is in the identical interfaces to the space segment. This paper describes for the two missions the joint operations concept, the parallel mission preparation activities and the approach to achieve an integrated flight operations team. Cost savings in ground segment development and operations are identified and compared to a traditional solution. The initial implementation experiences are critically presented.