Managing complexity to maximize science return: Science planning lessons learned from Cassini

Paczkowski, B.; Larsen, Barbara S.; Ray, T. L.

doi:10.1109/aero.2009.4839700

Cited by 12 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 6 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…This resulted in a mix of tools: those that were developed formally with systems engineering practices and ad-hoc tools that were developed outside the formal process. The ad-hoc tools lacked formal validation which led to inconsistent results among tools, maintenance was more difficult, and lack of support documentation made training difficult [5].…”

Section: Software Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Twenty years of systems engineering on the Cassini-Huygens Mission

Manor-Chapman

2013

2013 IEEE Aerospace Conference

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Over the past twenty years, the Cassini-Huygens Mission has successfully utilized systems engineering to develop and execute a challenging prime mission and two mission extensions. Systems engineering was not only essential in designing the mission, but as knowledge of the system was gained during cruise and science operations, it was critical in evolving operational strategies and processes. This paper discusses systems engineering successes, challenges, and lessons learned on the Cassini-Huygens Mission gathered from a thorough study of mission plans and developed scenarios, and interviews with key project leaders across its twenty-year history.

show abstract

Section: Software Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The removal of the turn table and scan platform resulted in complex science operations because instrument pointing was no longer separate from spacecraft pointing [5].…”

Section: Figure 3 the Huygens Probementioning

confidence: 99%

Twenty years of systems engineering on the Cassini-Huygens Mission

Manor-Chapman

2013

2013 IEEE Aerospace Conference

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In summary, the Cassini prime mission was the most complicated gravity assist tour ever flown. 2 The Cassini Orbiter also carried along the Huygens probe, destined to measure Titan's atmosphere in situ and land on Titan's surface. The probe was deployed on December 25, 2004.…”

Section: The Mission Spacecraft and Instrumentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Handling Late Changes to Titan Science

Pitesky

Steadman

Ray

et al. 2014

SpaceOps 2014 Conference

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The Cassini mission has been in orbit for eight years, returning a wealth of scientific data from Titan and the Saturnian system. The mission, a cooperative undertaking between NASA, ESA and ASI, is currently in its second extension of the prime mission. The Cassini Solstice Mission (CSM) extends the mission's lifetime until Saturn's northern summer solstice in 2017. The Titan Orbital Science Team (TOST) has the task of integrating the science observations for all 56 targeted Titan flybys in the CSM. In order to balance Titan science across the entire set of flybys during the CSM, to optimize and influence the Titan flyby altitudes, and to decrease the future workload, TOST went through a "jumpstart" process before the start of the CSM. The "jumpstart" produced Master Timelines for each flyby, identifying prime science observations and allocating control of the spacecraft attitude to specific instrument teams. Three years after completing this long-range plan, TOST now faces a new challenge: incorporating changes into the Titan Science Plan without undoing the balance achieved during the jumpstart. Some changes add additional science opportunities on top of existing observations, as when we devised a new way to gather additional gravity data without impact to the originally planned science observations, using the spacecraft's Low Gain Antenna. Balance can also be impacted when instrument anomalies threaten the loss of a unique high-priority science opportunity. In response to one such situation, we created an alternative flyby timeline while keeping the original timeline viable late in the sequence planning process. As the aging spacecraft's capabilities change, we respond by tweaking long-planned observations. And as our consumables run low and project management scrutinizes their use ever more carefully, we add early detailed analysis of hydrazine use during Titan flybys, allowing us the option of redesigning (and thus saving) observations that might otherwise be removed during sequence development as being too "expensive". All this must be accomplished with a smaller workforce than was available during the Prime and first Extended mission. This paper looks at how TOST handles these and other late changes to Titan science

show abstract

“…As a second application area, we are modeling several aspects of the Cassini science planning process [12,13], including the trade-off between collecting data (subject to onboard recorder capacity) and transmitting saved data to Earth, which requires a maneuver to point the high-gain antenna to Earth. The choice of downlink timing and ground-based antenna size (70m vs. 34m) has a major impact on how much data can be collected and transmitted, and propagates back to the different science teams in terms of which instruments are in use and in which modes.…”

Section: Cassinimentioning

confidence: 99%

Multi-Objective Scheduling for Space Science Missions

Johnston¹,

Giuliano²

2011

J. Adv. Comput. Intell. Intell. Inform.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We have developed an architecture called MUSE (Multi-User Scheduling Environment) to enable the integration of multi-objective evolutionary algorithms with existing domain planning and scheduling tools. Our approach is intended to make it possible to reuse existing software, while obtaining the advantages of multi-objective optimization algorithms. This approach enables multiple participants to actively engage in the optimization process, each representing one or more objectives in the optimization problem. As initial applications, we apply our approach to scheduling the James Webb Space Telescope, where three objectives aremodeled: minimizing wasted time, minimizing the number of observations that miss their last planning opportunity in a year, and minimizing the (vector) build up of angularmomentumthat would necessitate the use of mission critical propellant to dump the momentum. As a second application area, we model aspects of the Cassini science planning process, including the trade-off between collecting data (subject to onboard recorder capacity) and transmitting saved data to Earth. A third mission application is that of scheduling the Cluster 4-spacecraft constellation plasma experiment. In this paper we describe our overall architecture and our adaptations for these different application domains. We also describe our plans for applying this approach to other science mission planning and scheduling problems in the future.

show abstract

Managing complexity to maximize science return: Science planning lessons learned from Cassini

Cited by 12 publications

References 6 publications

Twenty years of systems engineering on the Cassini-Huygens Mission

Twenty years of systems engineering on the Cassini-Huygens Mission

Handling Late Changes to Titan Science

Multi-Objective Scheduling for Space Science Missions

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About