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Science Goal Driven Observing and Spacecraft AutonomySpacecraft autonomy will be an integral part of mission operations in the coming decade. While recent missions have made great strides in the ability to autonomously monitor and react to changing health and physical status of spacecraft, little progress has been made in responding quickly to science driven events. For observations of inherently variable targets and targets of opportunity, the ability to recognize early if an observation will meet the science goals of a program, and react accordingly, can have a major positive impact on the overall scientific returns of an observatory and on its operational costs. If the onboard software can reprioritize the schedule to focus on alternate targets, discard uninteresting observations prior to downloading, or download a subset of observations at a reduced resolution, the spacecraft's overall efficiency will be dramatically increased. The science goal monitoring (SGM) system is a proof- of-concept effort to address the above challenge. The SGM will have an interface to help capture higher-level science goals from the scientists and translate them into a flexible observing strategy that SGM can execute and monitor. 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. This paper 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 proposed MIDEX-class mission Kronos. 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.
Document ID
20020072733
Acquisition Source
Goddard Space Flight Center
Document Type
Conference Paper
Authors
Jones, Jeremy
(NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Greenbelt, MD United States)
Grosvenor, Sandy
(Booz-Allen and Hamilton, Inc. United States)
Korathkar, Anuradha
(Space Telescope Science Inst. United States)
Memarsadeghi, Nargess
(NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Greenbelt, MD United States)
Wolf, Karl
(Commerce One, Inc. United States)
Obenschain, Arthur F.
Date Acquired
August 20, 2013
Publication Date
January 1, 2002
Subject Category
Space Communications, Spacecraft Communications, Command And Tracking
Meeting Information
Meeting: SpaceOps 2002
Location: Houston, TX
Country: United States
Start Date: October 9, 2002
End Date: October 12, 2002
Distribution Limits
Public
Copyright
Work of the US Gov. Public Use Permitted.

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