Building Resource-Dependent Conditional Plans for an Earth Monitoring Satellite

Abstract

This paper introduces a conditional planning and execution system for an Earth monitoring satellite. This system builds plans containing optional acquisitions that are activated or not at execution time depending on the amount of energy actually available. One originality is that the energy activation thresholds computed on the ground take into account the capacity of the satellite to use an heliocentric pointing or switch off the payload when acquisitions are canceled. Another originality is that the conditional planner proposed uses several energy propagation models, from conservative models containing margins on power production to optimistic models that allow opportunistic acquisitions to be planned.