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Preparing for Satellite Operations

The Mission Operations (MOps) team controls all commands sent to the satellite and ensures that the system is operating safely while in orbit. This includes simulating satellite operations on a regular basis, both during the mission lifetime and through the integration and test phase. In addition, it is their job to monitor all spacecraft telemetry to assess whether hardware is in a healthy state (overheating, low on power, etc). Operations schedules will be sent once a week to the satellite, which will tell the spacecraft when to perform imaging operations or when to downlink images to the ASU ground station.

Finally, operators will examine all images and supporting telemetry once they are received from orbit and to assess its accuracy and make image corrections where necessary. To do this, the team must have a strong understanding of how the FLIR camera operates as well as what the thermal conditions of the payload were at the time each image was taken.

The image and the mission operations analysis is then handed over to our science team to use for the science investigation. Therefore, it is important that mission operators work closely with the science team to ensure that the image accuracy is well understood and that operations are being scheduled in a way that will best benefit the science objective.

Team Responsibilities

  1. Determine, learn and test mission planning software to interpret where the satellite is in its orbit and develop mission operations schedules accordingly

  2. Develop schedule for the satellite to operate on, and a schedule builder to help automate the process and reduce error

  3. Understand all risks and faults found on the satellite and develop procedures for mitigating these, should they happen

  4. Develop ways for organizing all telemetry and image data on the satellite to monitor for anomalies

Mission Planning

Planning satellite operations requires having efficient modeling software which can simulate the satellite's power consumption, maneuvers, and tasks related to the science objective. The team practices simulating these most especially during the integration and test phase for practice and to find holes/bugs in the operations procedure. The operations planning side is no small feat, so it is normally recommended to start this as soon as possible. We use two main software systems for planning Phoenix: 

 

NAIF

 NAIF is a mission planning software developed by JPL for modeling spacecraft maneuvers. For planning the Phoenix mission operations sequences, the team will use the software to propagate what times during the week the satellite will be over our target cities, which we can then translate into an operations schedule. The challenge with any planning software, however, is ensuring we know that the information we model is accurate.

Website Link: https://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/naif/

 

JMars is a software developed at ASU, which is used for several other spacecraft missions, such as THEMIS. The team will take the trajectory files from NAIF and input them into JMars to organize and create the operations schedules the satellite will obey while in space. This reduces complexity in allowing the team to create a structure for the regular mission operations which occur so that schedules can be created easily.  

Website Link: https://jmars.asu.edu/

 

Telemetry Parsing & Visulalization

All telemetry will be parsed and visualized using ground software developed by the student team.