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Software applications for mission planning

During the last five decades DLR/GSOC has been responsible for the preparation and execution of many manned and unmanned space missions. Effective and professionell planning is an essential factor for the success.

Mission Planning is a highly complex process which requires:

• Collecting and analyzing of information, resources and requirements
• Planning of all on-board activities of an unmanned or manned spacecraft
• Sophisticated, intelligent and fast tools to support support mission preparation tasks and mission execution tasks
• Automatic and interactive generation of the mission timeline
• Production of all necessary outputs and documentation

Experienced scientists of the GSOC planning team have developed an own planning system for the optimization and coordination of all activities on board of a spacecraft. It is being continuously enhanced to meet new requirements by adopting new planning concepts.

The GSOC planning system - a well established and proven tool suite

1. Successfully tested in manned missions like D-2, X-SAR/SRTM, MIR
2. Sucessfully implemented during scientific satellite missions (CHAMP, GRACE 1&2, TerraSAR-X und TanDEM-X).

It can be configured in various ways to meet a broad range of planning problems. Its main components are:

• PLATO – An extrem fast and intelligent planning tool
  The strengths are the descriptive and flexible modeling capabilities and the high performant multi threaded engine with rich support for creating a custom algorithm. Generic algorithms are available, which cover the most common scheduling requirements.
  
• PINTA (Program for Interactive Timeline Analysis) – An interactive planning and visualization tool
  It is ideally suited for the performing of the planning process from the definition of resources and tasks through automatic scheduling. With the aid of conflict indicators and resource usage indicators an intuitive and straight-forward timeline modification is possible. PINTA works as the interface to the miission planning database and PLATO
  
• TimOnWeb – A flexible visualization tool for the mission timeline.
  
• SCOTA - Current generation of mission analysis and event calculation software with advanced visualization support
  It supports the most commonly used orbit propagator models (SGP4, SGP8, etc) for different mission requirements. Depending on the trajectory and attitude of the considered spacecraft, a number of events can be calculated and visualized in 2D and/or 3D graphics. Examples for these events are day/night periods, satellite visibility and target opportunities. Furthermore, the software also supports spacecraft groundtrack real-time plotting.