Building Flexible Download Plans for Agile Earth-Observing Satellites

We consider the problem of downloading observations for a next-generation agile Earth-observing satellite. The goal is to schedule file downloads during ground reception station visibility windows while minimizing information age and promoting the fair sharing of the satellite between users. It is a complex scheduling problem with constraints ranging from unsharable resources to timedependent processing times. Usually, planning and scheduling are done on the ground but in our case, data volumes are unpredictable and we propose to share decisionmaking between the ground and the onboard software, which allows us to take decisions knowing the data volume onboard while keeping a fair level of predictability on the ground. We develop several levels of flexibility, a decision-making architecture and compare these approaches on realistic scenarios.