Fully Automated Mission Planning and Capacity Analysis Tool for the DEIMOS-2 Agile Satellite

The DEIMOS-2 mission, launched in June 2014 and currently carrying out routine operations, is aimed at operating an agile small satellite for high-resolution Earth Observation applications. The spacecraft can be steered to accurately point the payload up to 45° off-nadir. The platform agility makes mission planning a complex optimization problem, which is cumbersome for human operators. Automation emerges as a key enabler for the mission planning and exploitation process. This paper presents the “Capacity Analysis and Mission Planning Tool” developed by DEIMOS to produce feasible acquisition sequences from a set of user areas of interest. By feasible, we mean they do not overlap and they fulfil the platform constraints: attitude manoeuvring agility and stability requirements, on-board memory and downlink, power production and battery capacity. Besides the significant workflow enhancement obtained by the full automation of mission planning, the tool is also able to optimize the mission return by repeating the scheduling exercise and selecting the best-performing mission timeline. In addition, the tool can simulate the execution of user-defined sequences of spacecraft operations (i.e., mission timelines), thanks to a high-fidelity system simulator, and detect any possible resource conflict in terms of agility, power and memory.