At the German Space Operations Center (GSOC) two applications had been developed for scheduling operations of Launch and Early Orbit Phases (LEOP), Commissioning Phases or special operations campaigns (e.g. software upload, special orbit maneuvers, etc.): one for low earth orbit (LEO) and one for medium (MEO) and geostationary earth orbit (GEO). The experiences of these tools were now merged with the scheduling capabilities of GSOC's generic mission planning application Pinta (Program for interactive timeline analysis), its scheduling library Plato (Planning tool) and the GSOC web based timeline display TimOnWeb.

The German Space Operations Center currently operates five low Earth orbit satellites in routine phase. The supported missions are the GRACE-mission (two satellites with an along track separation of 200km), the TerraSAR-X/TanDEM-X mission (two satellites in close formation flight at few hundred meters distance) and the Firebird mission with an infra-red camera on the spacecraft TET-1. The Firebird mission will be extended by a second spacecraft BIROS in near future. Effort has been spent to exploit synergy potentials in operations of these spacecraft. Since 2014 they are controlled in a multi-mission control room to facilitate combined operations for the multi-mission flight support team. The concept of the multi-mission layout of the control room will be described in this paper. Control room activities of low Earth orbiting satellites are driven by ground stations passes. Maximal synergies are possible whenever the ground station passes of the different missions are homogenously distributed over the day. In this case a minimum of multi-mission flight personnel is able to support the different missions sequentially. However, the timing of the ground station passes may not be chosen freely as the visibility times of ground stations are given by the combination of orbit and the geolocation of the available ground stations. In order to avoid conflicts with support times of other satellites a choice between different visibilities in sub sequential orbits is, in some cases, compliant with the mission's operations concept and requirements. Another option might be the selection of alternative ground stations in different parts of the world. The operational integration of new ground stations in the mission's network with an appropriate connection line is a precondition. The missions TerraSAR-X/TanDEM-X and GRACE comprise two spacecraft each. In both cases the spacecraft orbit fly in close spatial proximity and both missions use ground stations of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Germany, namely Weilheim in southern part, and Neustrelitz in northern part. One ground station supports the first satellite of the mission, the other ground station the second satellite of the same mission. As a consequence the support times in the control room for the two spacecraft are practically identical. In order to open-up the possibility to support parallel passes with a minimum of staff the operational task during passes needs to be reduced and simplified. This is done by assistance of automatic processes taking care of certain pass preparation functions, commanding and post pass activities or by the restriction of active interaction to one satellite only. The concept ideas are described in the paper. A further complication exists by the fact that the satellites of the GRACE mission do not have a sun synchronous orbit. The passes of the Grace satellites move in daytime in contrast to the ones of the TanDEM-X/TerraSAR-X mission and the TET-1 spacecraft. As a consequence the overall support pattern changes from day to day. An extreme ...

In the recent years, the "Program for INteractive Timeline Analysis" PINTA, developed at the German Space Operation Center (GSOC), was continuously improved and experienced several evolution steps. PINTA is a GUI application running on Windows-based computer systems, whose main purpose is to serve as the anchor tool for a mission planning operation's engineer when generating, modifying or analysing a mission timeline. This is supported by calling automatic planning algorithms of the embedded generic planning library "PLAnningTOol" PLATO, using input of the embedded orbit propagation and event calculation library "SpaceCraft Orbit and GroundTrack Analysis Tool" SCOTA, or its expandability through plugins.PINTA is the generic basis of many semi-automated mission planning systems for past, current and future spacecraft projects operated at GSOC. It is used or has been used for the missions Grace, TET-OOV, FireBird, Grace-FollowOn, Eu:CROPIS and is currently prepared for CubeL. Furthermore, PINTA serves as the timeline analysis tool for validating the TerraSAR-X/TanDEM-X mission planning system.The variety of use cases was further extended to support Launch and Early Orbit Phases (LEOPs) in its special "SoEEditor" configuration as the new generic editing tool for the so-called "Sequence of Events". It was successfully used for the satellites Biros, HAG-1, PAZ, Grace-FollowOn 1 & Grace-FollowOn 2, Eu:Cropis, EDRS-C and is currently in preparation for EnMAP. In addition to LEOP's, the SoEEditor was also capable of supporting the constellation maneuvers for the TerraSAR-X/TanDEM-X mission.Besides all these use cases, the paper at hand will especially describe how PINTA was even further extended to not only tackle spacecraft-based but also ground-based scheduling. On the one hand it serves as an "On-Call Tool" to support the on-call shifts by automatically generating conflict-free role-based shift plans for all subsystems by considering various constraints like person outages, working hours, role-conflicts, etc… The plan can then be further adapted manually to cope with user change-requests. On the other hand it is used as a "Multi-Mission-Control-Room-and-pass-Scheduler" (MuMiCoRoS) to coordinate the ground-station booking of all LEO (low-earth orbit) satellites: TerraSAR-X, TanDEM-X, TET, Biros, Grace-FollowOn 1 & 2 and Eu:CROPIS. In order to avoid ground-station and operator conflicts between the missions, an automatic and combined plan for all satellites is generated which can then be further modified manually if necessary.As another use case, PINTA (a.k.a. GPT; Galileo Planning Tool) supports the Galileo Service Operation (GSOp). The planning process involves three timelines: a Short-Term Plan (STP), covering the next ten days, two Mid-Term Plans (MTP) for the Operational (OPE) and the Validation (VAL) chain), covering the next 15 weeks, and a Long-Term Plan (LTP), covering the next 15 months. The activities in these timeframes cover all subsystems of Galileo: Flight Ops, Control segment, Mission segment, remote sit...