VisionSpace has been awarded a study project by the European Space Agency to further develop new paradigms towards more automated and offline operations. We are teaming up with Solenix to make this study a real case of success.

Currently, space missions rely on heavy ground planning and monitoring and control activities. Planning, especially of payload operations, tends to be carried out weeks or months in advance, and it is usually quite inflexible to last-minute modifications. Monitoring and control activities are already carried, for most missions, partially online and partially offline, but always with significant human intervention.

A new operational concept would consider re-distributing responsibilities between the ground segments and the spacecraft, to reduce operations costs (OPEX), increase scientific return and support future missions involving large constellations in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), and missions beyond LEO with significant communication delays.

The concept of automated operations centres on supporting the spacecraft with automated planning-scheduling and execution-monitoring tasks with limited to no routine assistance of the ground-support teams. Automated operations reduce the need for online, synchronous access to the spacecraft by focusing on operational plans conceived for being processed, executed and updated by onboard and ground software systems, without or with limited intervention of human operators. In such a scenario, the human operator plays a supervisory role, while routine, repetitive and time-consuming activities are delegated to software systems.