Sylvain Lodiot

Human dependability and knowledge management in spacecraft operations — Successes and lessons learned from 12 years in-flight experience on Mars Express and Rosetta

For long-duration missions such as Mars Express and Rosetta, operating at considerable distances from Earth and with complex and highly variable mission profiles, issues of automation, the retention of knowledge and experience, and the potential human risk factor are especially relevant. Maximising the benefits of a “human in-the-loop” are increasingly seen as fundamental to on-going mission success. This paper presents a summary of these benefits, the experiences gained and the lessons learned. In section 4 of the paper specific case studies are presented, illustrating for both missions the significance of human involvement. This facilitated for Mars Express: (i) more efficient use of limited resources on the spacecraft; (ii) safer and more robust routine operations (as a reaction to critical on-board anomalies); (iii) the resolution of potentially significant scientific losses to the mission; and (iv) the realisation of a science return after mitigating risk during the encounter with Comet Siding Spring. Complementary case studies are also presented for Rosetta. In section 5, the principal lessons learned from the two missions are reviewed. These lessons encompass the experiences and knowledge gathered during extensive simulations and training campaigns, as well as years of in-flight experience. It is shown how a continually evolving mission profile (due, for example, to changes in science requirements, anomalies on the spacecraft or complex and changing mission phases), and on-going staff turnover, have led to significant challenges in knowledge retention and dissemination. Experience gained in the implementation of control-room automation is specifically highlighted - a concept introduced partly as a proof of concept, but also as a complement to (and extension of) automation implemented within the Mission Planning System. The relevance of the above experiences to the future evolution of the Mars Express mission is presented in section 6. This mission will have to manage a number of future challenges: (i) safely automating end-to-end spacecraft operations from planning and scheduling to spacecraft commanding; (ii) increasingly automating the verification process wherever possible and utilising the human resources where they are most valuable to the process; (iii) conducting safe operations within increasingly constraining power/thermal conditions; (iv) ensuring that knowledge and expertise can be retained in future years, after the Rosetta mission has ended. To summarise, the longevity and success of such complex missions could not have been achieved without the resourcefulness and adaptability offered by the human operator in the loop. The primary challenge for the remaining years of the Mars Express mission is therefore how to build on this knowledge and expertise for the benefit of the mission, whilst also encouraging and fostering a more institutionalised approach to knowledge capture and dissemination for the missions to come.

Rosetta/BepiColombo Mission Planning System: From Mission to Infrastructure

Mission planning involves the processing of requested operations by multiple stakeholders taking into consideration aspects such as the mission planning rules, operational constraints and on-board resources availability. These aspects derive from a number of sources including the overall mission definition, operations principles, manning/effort and resource management, like power consumption or data generation and return.

Automating ESA’s Planetary Missions: From Concept to Conclusion

ESA’s Solar and Planetary Missions Division currently operates four missions Cluster, Venus Express, Mars Express and Rosetta. As all these missions have been flying for many years their operations are very regular and the ground station passes are conducted according to a limited set of routine procedures. Certain well understood anomalies can also be handled in the same way as routine operations through isolated and well tested procedures. ESA wants to avoid overloading the spacecraft controllers with time critical manual operations and assist them as much as possible by conducting all or some procedures with an automation system. This is especially the case since Rosetta resumed operations after exiting hibernation in January 2014 and passes are now conducted in parallel with Mars Express and Venus Express. An automation system which conducts these routine procedures in a safe, reliable and repeatable way reduces human error and ensures that the controller has more time to conduct and analyse aspects which fall outside the daily routine. Facilitating one controller to supervise passes on more than one spacecraft can also help to reduce operational costs. This paper will discuss the challenges arising when developing and implementing any automation system. One of the key aspects is that it must support transition to and from manual operations in a safe way in case a problem or unexpected situation occurs, because it is impossible to foresee all possible failures and/or anomalies and deal with them in an autonomous way. This goes hand in hand with the second aspect that the change-over between automated and manual operations must be quick and not require re-start/reconfiguration of the whole system. On top of that it is important to find a balance between maximising visibility of the system to allow debugging and failure recovery and providing a high level overview for the operators to quickly check the state of the pass conduction. Since June 2013, Venus Express has been using an automation system based on the Manufacturing and Operations Information System (MOIS) interfacing to the mission control system software of ESA SCOS-2000® including the mission specific extension developed by SCISYS. The automation system complements the Mission Planning System (MPS) and is used for routine interaction with the spacecraft: setup ground segment subsystems, manage links with ground stations, spacecraft health checks, dump of housekeeping and payload telemetry, routine commanding and logging of activities. The