Nursing 4 Cluster Spacecraft with Aging Batteries Through Eclipses

Volpp, J.; Godfrey, James; Foley, Steve; Fornarelli, David; Pullig, Colette; It, Vega; Servan, Pierre; Deutschland, Telespazio; Appel, Pontus; Sangiorgi, Silvia

doi:10.2514/6.2008-3278

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 1 publication

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“…5 During eclipses, without SAP and with the batteries not able to provide enough power, the Cluster satellites experience a complete power down (with the exception of spacecraft 2, which still has enough capacity to survive short duration eclipses). While the spacecraft is in the eclipse umbra all payloads and subsystems remain off, including the keep alive lines which power a critical memory circuit known as protected memory (PM).…”

Section: Eclipse Operationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Avoiding Cluster Safe Modes

Clerigo¹

2012

SpaceOps 2012 Conference

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Cluster is a multi-spacecraft ESA mission launched in 2000 to study the Earth's magnetic environment. After more than 11 years in space, the performance of the batteries and the solar arrays has decreased dramatically limiting the available power on-board. This is becoming a serious problem for contingency situations because hard-coded sequences executed during safe modes require much more power than what it is provided by the solar arrays. As a consequence safe modes are no longer safe and they can trigger main bus under-voltages, multiple reboots or even an uncontrolled switch off of the on-board computer. Several techniques have been studied to avoid or minimize the impact of safe modes and have been successfully implemented and validated during 2011 eclipse season. An analysis of Cluster safe modes with limited power and the alternatives to deal with them is the subject of this paper.

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Section: Eclipse Operationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Avoiding Cluster Safe Modes

Clerigo¹

2012

SpaceOps 2012 Conference

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“…All payload and subsystem must be powered off before umbra entry and reconfigured after the end of the eclipse. Real-time contingency eclipse preparation and recovery became one of the most outstanding features of Cluster operations 5 .…”

Section: B Battery Degradationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evolution of Cluster Mission Planning

Bartesaghi¹

2012

SpaceOps 2012 Conference

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Cluster is a four-spacecraft mission launched in 2000 to study the Earth's magnetic field and its interaction with the solar wind. Originally supposed to last two and a half years, the mission is now extended until the end of 2014 provided a successful midterm review in June 2012. In time, the Cluster ground segment has undergone a thorough modernization process. Lately, the mission planning system has been the object of the biggest changes. The initial strategy was to optimize the utilization of a single ground station by all four of the spacecraft. This was soon modified to account for a second ground station, in order to increase the science data return. Each station had to be allocated to a specific pair of spacecraft. Such a rigid planning approach became, year after year, more inadequate as the evolving orbit changed the visibility, and the spacecraft power subsystem degraded. Many more ground stations are needed today, and the increased complexity of the spacecraft operations requires the capability for short term re-scheduling. Currently, an interactive and fast adapting mission planning system is used. A key-role is played by Cluster Web, a software package entirely developed by the Cluster flight control team to offer a visual overview of the mission plan and an elegant interface to implement conflict-free changes. Its description is the objective of this paper, together with the discussion of the transition from an 18-years old VMS architecture to a Linux system that took advantage from the on-going development of several mission planning facilities within the European Space Operations Centre. The goal is to underline how a flexible approach and the ability to design and develop ad-hoc tools could cope with continuously evolving operational demands and budget constraints.

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“…A similar scenario occurred with some of the batteries of the ESA's Cluster spacecraft fleet. To cope with this situation, during every eclipse, the Cluster's Flight Control Team (FCT) has to switch off the entire spacecraft [1]. However, some missions, an example being XMM-Newton, require the heaters to be permanently on, for instance to avoid degrading critical instruments or preventing the hydrazine from freezing.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Optimization of the battery usage during eclipses using a machine learning approach

Canio

Boumghar²,

Godard³

et al. 2018

2018 SpaceOps Conference

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During eclipses, the spacecraft cannot rely on solar energy and must exploit the power coming from the on-board batteries. Critical for the payload is to maintain its temperature inside a specific predetermined range to avoid degradation and malfunctioning. For XMM-Newton, this is done through the Temperature Closed Loop (TCL) unit, which automatically turns on and off the heaters when the instruments reach the minimum and maximum temperatures, respectively. A possible scenario is the case when more than a single instrument reaches the minimum temperature simultaneously, thus causing a peak in the demand of power from the batteries and threatening their integrity. Such a circumstance may impact the overall mission and a better battery management is therefore required. Here we propose a solution that uses machine learning to optimize the battery consumption during eclipses. We show that after training the algorithm with past data, we are able to predict the temperature profiles of the instruments with good accuracy. These predictions provide the relevant insight to determine the optimal times at which the heaters should be turned on and off, thus improving and optimizing the current eclipse operations. The approach presented here helps overcome the issue of excessively stressing the batteries and, despite being tailored for XMM-Newton, can be extended and applied to other missions as well.

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Nursing 4 Cluster Spacecraft with Aging Batteries Through Eclipses

Cited by 5 publications

References 1 publication

Avoiding Cluster Safe Modes

Avoiding Cluster Safe Modes

Evolution of Cluster Mission Planning

Optimization of the battery usage during eclipses using a machine learning approach

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