Mission design for the Space Infrared Telescope Facility

Kwok, Johnny H.; Osmolovsky, Michael G.

doi:10.1117/12.48711

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…The Earth-trailing solar orbit (Figure 1) greatly reduced Spitzer's size, cost, and engineering complexity, compared to its original Earth orbiting concept [4] . As its distance increases, the geometry of Spitzer, Earth, and the sun, coupled with a non-articulated antenna and solar panel will create difficult engineering trades across multiple subsystems.…”

Section: Pushing Spitzer To Its Operational Limitsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spitzer operations: scheduling the out years

et al. 2012

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Spitzer Warm Mission operations have remained robust and exceptionally efficient since the cryogenic mission ended in mid-2009. The distance to the observatory now exceeds 1 AU, making telecommunications increasingly difficult; however, analysis has shown that two-way communication could be maintained through at least 2017 with minimal loss in observing efficiency. The science program continues to emphasize the characterization of exoplanets, time domain studies, and deep surveys, all of which can impose interesting scheduling constraints. Recent changes have significantly improved on-board data compression, which both enables certain high volume observations and reduces Spitzer's demand for competitive Deep Space Network resources.

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Section: Pushing Spitzer To Its Operational Limitsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spitzer operations: scheduling the out years

et al. 2012

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“…Spitzer is in a unique Earth-trailing solar orbit [2] , receding from Earth at the rate of about 0.12 AU per year and currently at a distance of about 0.8 AU (Figure 1). This orbit has the great advantage of providing a very stable thermal environment while significantly simplifying operations compared to Earth orbiting observatories that must contend with Earth eclipses and a bright Moon.…”

Section: General Operations and Mission Phasesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spitzer warm mission transition and operations

et al. 2010

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Following the successful dynamic planning and implementation of IRAC Warm Instrument Characterization activities, transition to Spitzer Warm Mission operations has gone smoothly. Operation teams procedures and processes required minimal adaptation and the overall composition of the Mission Operation System retained the same functionality it had during the Cryogenic Mission. While the warm mission scheduling has been simplified because all observations are now being made with a single instrument, several other differences have increased the complexity. The bulk of the observations executed to date have been from ten large Exploration Science programs that, combined, have more complex constraints, more observing requests, and more exo-planet observations with durations of up to 145 hours. Communication with the observatory is also becoming more challenging as the Spitzer DSN antenna allocations have been reduced from two tracking passes per day to a single pass impacting both uplink and downlink activities. While IRAC is now operating with only two channels, the data collection rate is roughly 60% of the four-channel rate leaving a somewhat higher average volume collected between the less frequent passes. Also, the maximum downlink data rate is decreasing as the distance to Spitzer increases requiring longer passes. Nevertheless, with well over 90% of the time spent on science observations, efficiency has equaled or exceeded that achieved during the cryogenic mission.

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Mission design for the Space Infrared Telescope Facility

Cited by 2 publications

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Spitzer operations: scheduling the out years

Spitzer operations: scheduling the out years

Spitzer warm mission transition and operations

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