Analysis of automated techniques for routine monitoring and contingency detection of in-flight LEO operations at EUMETSAT

What it has been like to fly and operate Europe’s ocean and land watcher, Copernicus Sentinel 3

“…While the activity itself is quite straightforward, each of the steps have to be manually commanded and the monitoring has to be performed by the FCT via the Mission control system and also the CHART system Ref [5], which means that a commanding pass must be available. This is particularly difficult for the cooldown phase, as it is very difficult to estimate when the cold fingers will reach their target temperature.…”

CHARTing the Future – An offline data analysis and reporting toolkit to support automated decision-making in flight-operations

“…From the attitude disturbance and prediction of the impact site it might also be possible to estimate the particle energy, and help to populate the space situational awareness database of objects too small to observe or track in optical bands [1]. The nature of the ECSS PUS standard and the benefits it brings to spacecraft monitoring and control -both on board the satellite as well as at MCS level -can also be utilized by offline reporting and diagnostic tools such as CHART for a wide array of reporting and diagnostic purposes [4]. With further processing and computation, it is certainly possible to enhance data analysis capabilities beyond traditional analogue plots.…”

“…The concept of event driven reporting is not new [4], however, for missions that follow the ECSS-PUS standards data is distributed across a wide variety of mostly asynchronous packets. A system-level satellite 'state model' can then be derived on-ground from a combination of commanding history, on-board event reports and housekeeping telemetry.…”

“…3 Meteosat Spacecraft Operations Engineer, Operations & Services to Users. 4 Metop Payload System Operations Engineer, Operations & Services to Users. 5 Spacecraft Ops Prep Team Leader-Metop SG, Operations & Services to Users.…”