Autonomous Mission Planning and Scheduling Strategy for Data Transmission of Deep-Space Missions

Abstract

Regarding to the deep-space missions which are faraway from the Earth, the conventional command-dependent mission operation and control are challenged due to the long delay of the uplink. Under this circumstances, autonomous planning and scheduling attracts more and more attention. As a critical subsystem of a spacecraft, data transmission system is a key node of autonomous planning and scheduling. This paper discusses the strategy of autonomous mission planning and scheduling for deep-space data transmission tasks. First, from the system-level analysis, four planning requests are proposed, which covered the problems of link establishment, antenna pointing, data rate and storage. Then, planning strategy models as well as the mathematical models are built-up for each request. The strategy model clarifies the planning elements which are “plan period”, “constraints” and “activities”. The discussed models are not separated, the relations and connections among the four models are illustrated to form a integrated planning logic.