Mission Planning for the TIM Nanosatellite Remote Sensing Constellation

摘要

This paper describes the mission planning approach and system for the Telematics International Mission (TIM) nanosatellite remote sensing constellation. TIM is an international effort to build a constellation of cooperating nanosatellites for Earth Observation. Germany contributes to TIM with the Telematics Earth Observation Mission (TOM). To better explore TIM's synergies and optimize the use of resources, a centralized collaborative planning & scheduling system is introduced. The centralized planner receives observation requests, and generates a coherent schedule for observations and ground-station contacts for the entire constellation. This schedule considers individual satellite constraints, tries to maximize overall data collection and prioritizes acquisition and downlink of data from user-defined Areas Of Interest (AOIs). The proposed planning system extends the Advanced Planning and Scheduling Initiative (APSI) timeline-based framework, and the planning algorithms developed for the NetSat formation-flying mission, with a suite of optimization algorithms to solve the multi-satellite multi-ground-station scheduling problems. This papers starts by introducing the TIM and TOM missions and their planning domains. It then describes the proposed planning system and underlying algorithms. The proposed solution is finally evaluated against a set of mission scenarios. In the scenarios addressed in this paper the constellation is tasked to monitor global volcanic activity with the ultimate goal to track and retrieve ash cloud heights using photogrammetric methods.