Autonomous Mission Planning for Spin-Stabilized Science Satellites

When reducing the operations costs of a satellite program, planning and scheduling are prime areas for consideration. In particular, scheduling satellite activities is repetitive, time-consuming, and nontrivial. Automating these tasks can reduce operator staffing requirements and increase the utility of the satellite. Additionally, since the main cost of an automated scheduler is its development, being able to use the scheduler for different satellite programs would lead to great cost savings. Since there is such variety in satellite programs, no one scheduler can realistically be used to schedule them all. Automated schedulers can, however, be developed for "classes" of satellites that share the same fundamental characteristics. This paper describes a scheduler for a class of spin stabilized science satellites. Using a linear programming model of the mission, the value gained from the use of the instruments is optimized with respect to a given set of operational constraints. As a proof of concept, the scheduler is demonstrated in a case study. Finally, consideration of dynamic rescheduling in response to system failures is provided in an additional set of case studies.