EGOS Architecture and the Impact on Existing ESOC Ground Data Systems

A ground segment is essentially a “system of systems”, and as such possesses a high degree of complexity. This paper outlines what a typical ESA ground segment will look like in the near future and at how it is planned to evolve this to improve maintainability, increase reliability and decrease development costs. Also examined are ways of improving the utilisation of the hardware and increasing system longevity. I. Introduction HERE are a number of developments currently being carried out at the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) which will have significant implications for the development, deployment, operation and maintenance of its ground segments. One of the main components of this is the ESA Ground Operation System (EGOS), an ambitious program to standardize the infrastructure used throughout its ground segments in an effort to improve the reliability, cost effectiveness and interoperability. Initially it is concentrating on 3 areas of the ground segment, the station baseband system, the mission control systems and the simulators. Implementation of the initial phases of this has recently begun and is based on the CORBA Component Model (CCM). Another significant element is this EGOS User Desktop, this is being developed with the goal of proving a standard desktop that can be used across a wide range of systems (ideally all) and provide a common “look and feel” across the ground segment. In parallel to this a number of other systems are being developed addressing needs in the areas of automation, service provision, allocation of ground network resources and interoperability. Further activities are also underway defining the requirements for future data distribution systems, database systems, the station computer and also at harmonizing interfaces to elements of the ground segment not currently covered by EGOS, in particular with the Flight Dynamics systems. Underlying all these activities is an approach that is based on, where possible, the adoption of internationally recognised standards, the standardisation of interfaces and designing the new systems with reuse in mind. Longevity of the systems is also an important issue, and investigations are ongoing into the use of virtualisation to improve the lifetime of the software systems and also to reduce the amount of physical hardware required. The possible implications for future ESOC ground segments of the above developments are significant. Developments of future ground segments should be simplified since many of the aspects of the various component systems will be standardised, plus development of any components or systems required should be more straightforward as these will be built on the standard infrastructure provided by EGOS. In addition the physical deployment of systems becomes more flexible and this, combined with the use of virtualisation technology, will enable a more resource efficient deployment of systems. By using virtualisation the amount of physical hardware required will be reduced and there will be a considerable increase in the ability to distribute resources as and when required, e.g. for critical mission phases. With this in mind possible future deployment scenarios are discussed. On the operational side the development of the automation aspects offer the potential to significantly offload the routine workload of the spacecraft controller, offering the possibility of reduced staffing levels by permitting one operator to monitor the operations on more than one spacecraft. More flexible and efficient allocation of ground station resources will give the potential for increased science return from the missions supported.

The CCSDS cross-support Space Link Extension (SLE) services standards have been adopted by the main space organizations during the last decade. This has created a global system of interoperability and currently, spacecrafts are supported by multiple space agencies providing telemetry to the ground and receiving telecommands from the Mission Control Centre via different SLE compliant ground segment systems (Mission Control systems, TM&TC providers, SLE gateways, etc.) belonging to different space organizations (e.g. ESA, NASA, CNES, DLR, ASI, JAXA, CNSA, INPE, ISRO, etc.). To ensure a correct inter-agency operability among these SLE systems, the execution of coordinated crosssupport SLE tests between the different space organizations is required. Sometimes, these tests are not successful due to misalignments in the SLE systems’ configurations, network anomalies and other unforeseen issues (e.g. software bugs), resulting in extra analysis and troubleshooting activities to be performed by the space agencies involved in the tests. These investigations can take a long time, since the SLE ground segment systems used by the different space agencies do not always provide meaningful SLE traces and logging capabilities. To overcome these issues, the European Space Operation Centre (ESOC) has developed a real-time CCSDS Space Link Extension (SLE) dissector based on the popular open source network sniffer “Wireshark”, that is able to detect, decode and dissect the SLE Protocol Data Units (PDU) that are exchanged via the return and forward SLE transfer services between two or more SLE compliant systems. This paper describes the motivation for creating the SLE dissector and it presents the benefits of using the SLE dissector for inter-agency cross-support operations with a practical example (SLE cross support tests between NASA and ESA for the provision of MAVEN telemetry to NASA’s Mission Control Centre via the ESTRACK’s SLE TM&TC providers located at ESA’s ground station in Perth). Finally, this paper proposes possible future applications of the SLE dissector in the field of operations and engineering.

Rosetta mission operations for landing

The European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) is responsible for operating spacecraft covering a large range of mission types. These range from planetary probes/deep space missions through observatories and science missions to earth observation. All of these different types of missions have the need to plan operations on the spacecraft and, increasingly, of the ground segment. Typically the planning systems used to carry out this process have been implemented on a mission specific basis, at best utilizing some elements from a similar mission type. Reuse across different mission types has typically been almost non-existent. In order to increase synergy in the development of mission planning systems ESOC has started work to define a mission planning framework that can be used to build planning systems for any of the mission types operated. To do this it has been necessary to obtain input from the flight control teams of missions in operation and development. This has proved to be an interesting exercise as one of the main issues has been defining the terminology that was required. Whilst the terminology used amongst missions of the same type is similar it varies significantly between the mission types. This obviously adds considerably to the difficulty in trying to define a common approach to mission planning. To address this issue it was first necessary to define a set of terminology that was clear to all participants and could be used as the basis for defining a common concept. Once this has been done it then proved possible to identify a workflow that was largely applicable to most (although not all) missions. This workflow is as seen by the “planning team” part of a flight control team (FCT); no assumptions have been made as to whether the planning team is solely dedicated to planning activities, only that the planning is carried out as an FCT function.

World's largest space arena to be developed

Introduction The European Space Agency ‘s European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) became ISO-9001 certified in 1999. For this purpose a quality management system (QMS) was prepared and is maintained and improved. QMS describes all the business processes at ESOC and in particular covers the complete lifecycle of the projects, from initial definition, to the space and ground segment implementation and operation, and encompasses all engineering and operational activities.

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Space Debris Office provides a service to support operational collision avoidance activities. This support currently covers ESA’s missions Cryosat-2, Sentinel-1A and -2A, the constellation of Swarm-A/B/C in low-Earth orbit (LEO), as well as missions of third-party customers. In this work, we describe the current collision avoidance process for ESA and third-party missions in LEO. We give an overview on the upgrades developed and implemented since the advent of conjunction summary messages (CSM)/conjunction data messages (CDM), addressing conjunction event detection, collision risk assessment, orbit determination, orbit and covariance propagation, process control, and data handling. We pay special attention to the effect of warning thresholds on the risk reduction and manoeuvre rates, as they are established through risk mitigation and analysis tools, such as ESA’s Debris Risk Assessment and Mitigation Analysis (DRAMA) software suite. To handle the large number of CDMs and the associated risk analyses, a database-centric approach has been developed. All CDMs and risk analysis results are stored in a database. In this way, a temporary local “mini-catalogue” of objects close to our target spacecraft is obtained, which can be used, e.g., for manoeuvre screening and to update the risk analysis whenever a new ephemeris becomes available from the flight dynamics team. The database is also used as the backbone for a Web-based tool, which consists of the visualization component and a collaboration tool that facilitates the status monitoring and task allocation within the support team as well as communication with the control team. The visualization component further supports the information sharing by displaying target and chaser motion over time along with the involved uncertainties. The Web-based solution optimally meets the needs for a concise and easy-to-use way to obtain a situation picture in a very short time, and the support for third-party missions not operated from the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC). Finally, we provide statistics on the identified conjunction events, taking into account the known significant changes in the LEO orbital environment and share ESA’s experience along with recent examples.

A large part of ground segment operations relies on the use of files. Operational data often comes in the form of files (like tracking data) but also configuration data and logging for ground station subsystems is based on files. The reliable and timely transfer of all these files to their final destinations is of utmost importance. Routine file transfers can be fully automated but also file transfers that are only needed under special circumstances (troubleshooting) should be supported. In order to ensure the correct usage of the files and to facilitate the handling of different file versions additional features like version control and support for user-defined file metadata are very desirable. The paper describes the new ESOC approach to ground segment file handling. The FIDES (File Disseminator for ESTRACK Stations) system is used for archiving files in a centralized file archive at the ground stations and for the transfer and retrieval between the station and the control center in ESOC. There, GFTS (Generic File Transfer System) takes care of delivering the files to the users at the control center and EDDS (EGOS Data Dissemination System) provides access to Mission Control System data to external users.

BepiColombo is an interdisciplinary cornerstone mission to planet Mercury. It is a joint mission between ESA and JAXA consisting of 2 complementary spacecraft, the ESA Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and the JAXA Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO). The two spacecraft will be independently operated and controlled from the MPO Operations Ground Segment (OGS) located at the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) and the MMO Operations Centre at ISAS/JAXA Sagamihara Space Operations Centre (SSOC). The science operations for MMO will be prepared by the MMO Science Operations Centre at SSOC while the MPO operations by the MPO Science Ground Segment (SGS), located at the European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC) in Madrid, Spain. The BepiColombo MPO Science Ground Segment (SGS) combines the functionalities of a Science Operations Centre, covering the science operation planning and generation of consolidated payload command requests, and the science data handling and archiving tasks. BepiColombo’s MPO scientific payload comprises 11 instruments that will investigate the Mercury planet interior, surface composition and morphology, the intrinsic magnetic field and the composition of the exosphere and the coupling between all of these fields. The BepiColombo MPO has a large on board SSMM (Solid State Mass Memory) in order to store engineering and science data with a total capacity of 384 Gbit. The telemetry science data packets are stored in the SSMM packet stores based on Process Identifiers (PIDs). The instruments have been specified to generate lowand/or high-priority science data with different PIDs, such that this data can be stored in different packet stores. The BepiColombo MPO has two different radio frequency bands available for data return. The X-band channel is predictable in terms of planned data downlink and will be therefore used to return near real-time data needed on ground to check the spacecraft status/health and highpriority science data. In addition, a Ka-band downlink channel is available, where due to weather uncertainties larger data downlink latencies might arise. Thus, it is foreseen to return low-priority science data using the Kaband via file transfer with automatic retransmission of any lost packets. BepiColombo MPO has several downlink mechanisms in order to get the science data in an efficient way back to ground that combine the large

Estimating visitor spending through the segmentation approach has several advantages in terms of policy evaluation, user management and sampling design. This approach generally relies on visitor surveys to estimate two parameters, average spending per segment and segment share, so that total visitation can be apportioned to each subgroup. Equivalently, this approach is to estimate the weighted average spending by taking into consideration the relative shares of each user segment. This paper first provides a statistical formula to compute the variance of weighted average spending by taking into account the stochastic nature of spending and segment shares. Second, simulation analysis is adopted to compare the accuracy and precision of the spending estimator based on different study designs. The results show that conducting additional short surveys to obtain information on user segments provides two advantages. First, it helps to reduce non-response bias since certain visitor groups have higher ratios of unreturned questionnaires, incomplete data or non-participation. Second, it helps to decrease the variance of the estimator so that the upper and lower bound of the confidence interval can be narrowed. The level of variance reduction will depend on the relative segment shares, the average spending, cases that are obtained, spending variation and the probability of giving full spending information across segments. The implications for survey design are offered in light of the results.

10 - Object Analysis: Answers

Effective Operationally Responsive Space (ORS) requires a great deal of autonomy on flight systems as well as ground systems. TacSat-2 is the first ORS vehicle launched, and it has pioneered an aggressive schedule with 13 payloads and an ambitious requirement for experimentation, military exercises and scientific data return. One key element of the success of the TacSat-2 mission has been the aggressive use of autonomy and automation on both the ground segment as well as the flight segment. A unique software system called SCL is central to both segments. SCL provides an Expert System and Command Interpreter for the flight and ground system which has been used as a standardized platform for automation as well as an integration point for other autonomy technologies. SCL also supports an onboard planning system called the Autonomous Tasking Engine (ATE). ATE employs an onboard orbit propagator to aid in the scheduling of image collects or the re-planning of goals which might violate mission constraints. The system is also capable of re-planning objectives based on tactical user priority. The Onboard SCL and ATE systems are controlled, monitored and tasked thru a web-centric user interface called Remote Intelligent Monitoring System (RIMS). RIMS is an extensible real-time web-based commanding and telemetry system which also houses the Autonomous Mission Planning System (AMPS). Combined, the AMPS planning system and the on-board SCL/ATE Autonomy frameworks have proven, for the first time, to sufficiently simplify the direct commanding of a spacecraft to make it suitable for a tactical military operator. Based on feedback from users and military exercises, the AMPS planning system has evolved rapidly to minimize the knowledge needed by a tactical user to task the satellite. Due to the RIMS web-based solution, tactical users can field this tasking and data-dissemination system with little specialized equipment in the field. A standard web browser or even web enabled phone is virtually all that is needed on the client side to allow in-theater vehicle tasking. The tasking, entered in-theater or elsewhere, is automatically sent to the vehicle in real-time or at the next available contact. The automation process includes detection of spacecraft link and can prioritize tasks based on user. This paper will briefly discuss the on-board autonomy and explain how the ground-based RIMS/AMPS automation tools have proven that substantial ground automation and even “lights-out/unmanned” operations can be achieved using a reusable COTS-based solution.

BackgroundAcademic institutions building capacity for implementation scholarship are also well positioned to build capacity in real world health and human service settings. How practitioners and policy makers are included and trained in implementation capacity-building initiatives, and their impact on building implementation practice capacity is unclear. This scoping review identified and examined features of interventions that build implementation practice capacity across researchers and practitioners or practitioners-in-training.MethodsFive bibliographic databases were searched. Eligible studies (a) described an implementation capacity building intervention with a connection to an academic institution, (b) targeted researchers and practitioners (including practitioners-in-training, students, or educators), and (c) reported intervention or participant outcomes. Articles that only described capacity building interventions without reporting outcomes were excluded. Consistent with Arksey and O’Malley’s framework, key study characteristics were extracted (target participants, core components, and outcomes) and analyzed using open coding and numerical analysis.ResultsOf 1349 studies identified, 64 met eligibility for full-text review, and 14 were included in the final analysis. Half of the studies described implementation capacity building interventions that targeted health or behavioral health researchers, practitioners, and practitioners-in-training together, and half targeted practitioners or practitioners-in-training only. The most common components included structured didactic activities offered in person or online, mentorship and expert consultation to support implementation, and practical application activities (e.g., field placements, case studies). Knowledge sharing activities and technical assistance were less common. All studies reported favorable outcomes related to knowledge attainment, increased ability to implement evidence, productivity, and satisfaction.ConclusionsBuilding implementation capacity among practitioners is critical for integrating insights from implementation science into the field and preventing the “secondary” implementation research-to-practice gap. This scoping review identified several promising implementation practice capacity building interventions that tend to build practitioner capacity via expert led activities which may be relevant for academic institutions seeking to build implementation practice capacity. To avoid widening the implementation research-to-practice gap, implementation capacity building interventions are needed that target policy makers, expand beyond multiple practice settings, and leverage university/community partnerships or on-site academic medical centers. Future studies will also be needed to test the impact on service quality and public health outcomes.

Science and Technology Satellite-3 (STSAT-3) is a 150 kg class micro satellite based with the national space program. The STSAT-3 system consists of a space segment, ground segment, launch service segment, and various external interfaces including additional ground stations to support launch and early operation phases. The major ground segment is the ground station at the Satellite Technology Research Center, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology site. The ground station provides the capability to monitor and control STSAT-3, conduct STSAT-3 mission planning, and receive, process, and distribute STSAT-3 payload data to satisfy the overall missions of STSAT-3. The ground station consists of the mission control element and the data receiving element. This ground station is designed with the concept of low cost and high efficiency. In this paper, the requirements and design of the ground station that has been developed are examined.

EURECA Mission Summary