SOFIA'S Challenge: Scheduling Airborne Astronomy Observations

The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) is NASA's next generation airborne astronomical observatory, and will commence operations in 2005. The facility consists of a 747-SP modified to accommodate a 2.5 meter telescope. SOFIA is expected to fly an average of 140 science flights per year over its 20 year lifetime. Depending on the nature of the instrument used during flight, 5-15 observations per flight are expected. The SOFIA telescope is mounted aft of the wings on the port side of the aircraft and is articulated through a range of 20deg to 60deg of elevation. The telescope has minimal lateral flexibility; thus, the aircraft must turn constantly to maintain the telescope's focus on an object during observations. A significant problem in future SOFIA operations is that of scheduling flights in support of observations. Investigators are expected to propose small numbers of observations, and many observations must be grouped together to make up single flights. Flight planning for the previous generation airborne observatory, the Kuiper Airborne Observatory (KAO), was done by hand; planners had to choose takeoff time, observations to perform, and decide on setup-actions (called "dead-legs") to position the aircraft prior to observing. This task frequently required between 6-8 hours to plan one flight The scope of the flight planning problem for supporting GI observations with the anticipated flight rate for SOFIA makes the manual approach for flight planning daunting. In response, we have designed an Automated Flight Planner (AFP) that accepts as input a set of requested observations, designated flight days, weather predictions and fuel limitations, and searches automatically for high-quality flight plans that satisfy all relevant aircraft and astronomer specified constraints. The AFP can generate one candidate flight plan in 5-10 minutes, of computation time, a feat beyond the capabilities of human flight planners. The rate at which the AFP can generate flights enables humans to assess and analyze complex tradeoffs between fuel consumption, estimated science quality and the percentage of scheduled observations. Due to the changing nature of SOFIA scheduling problems, this functionality will play a crucial role in optimizing science and minimizing costs during operations. In the full paper, we will summarize the technical challenges that have been met in order to build this system. These include: design of the search algorithm, design of appropriate heuristics and approximations, and reduction in the size of the search space. We will also describe technical challenges that are currently being addressed, including the extension of the existing approach to handle new solution criteria. Finally, we will describe a variety of cultural challenges that the astronomical community must address in order to successfully use SOFIA, and describe how the AFT can be used to address some of these challenges. Specifically, many of the intended science users are accustomed to using ground-based or space-based observatories; we will identify some differences that arise due to the nature of airborne observatories, and how the AFT can be extended to provide useful services to ease these cultural differences.