An End-to-End Architecture for Science Goal Driven Observing

New observatories will have greater on-board storage capacity and on-board processing capabilities. The new bottleneck will be download capacity. The cost of downlink time and limitations of bandwidth will end the era where all exposure data is downloaded and all data processing is performed on the ground. In addition, observing campaigns involving inherently variable targets will need scheduling flexibility to focus observing time and data download on exposures that are scientifically interesting. The ability to quickly recognize and react to such events by re-prioritizing the observing schedule will be an essential characteristic for maximizing scientific returns. It will also be a step towards increasing spacecraft autonomy, a major goal of NASA's strategic plan. The science goal monitoring (SGM) system is a proof-of-concept effort to address these challenges. We are developing an interactive distributed system that will use on-board processing and storage combined with event-driven interfaces with ground-based processing and operations, to enable fast re-prioritization of observing schedules, and to minimize time spent on non-optimized observations. SGM is initially aimed towards time-tagged observing modes used frequently in spectroscopic studies of varying targets. In particular, the SGM is collaborating with the proposed MIDEX-class mission Kronos team. The variable targets that Kronos seeks to study make an adaptive system such as SGM particularly valuable for achieving mission goals. However, the architecture and interfaces will also be designed for easy adaptability to other observing platforms, including ground-based systems and to work with different scheduling and pipeline processing systems. This talk will focus on our strategy for developing SGM and the technical challenges that we have encountered. We will discuss the SGM architecture as it applies to the Kronos mission and explain how it is scalable to other missions.