Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
{Coordinates the agent community in the MCC, manages
mission goals and coordinates the Contact manager agent}
S/C
Agent 1
Proxy
{ There is a proxy agent for each spacecraft in orbit.
The agents keep track of spacecraft status and
will flag the Mission Management agent when an
anomaly occurs that may need handling }
MCC
Manager
S/C
Agent 2
Proxy
Contact
Manager
Agent
S/C
Agent N
Proxy
User
Interface
Agent
Scientists
Engineers,
Operators,
{Provides interface and interaction
mechanisms to the outside world}
{Plans and schedules contacts with the spacecraft
via Interface with external planner/scheduler
(external resource) }
MCC Planning
and scheduling
Agent
{Coordinates ground station activities (one agent per ground station),
Communicates with spacecraft, sends and receives commands
and telemetry }
Fig. 9.1.
The agent concept testbed (ACT) consists of a community of cooperating
agents each of which is component-based (from Chap.
4
)
There are a number of implementation issues that are unique to spacecraft
constellations. Four examples presented below provide some insight into the
challenges that will undoubtedly confront aerospace hardware and software
engineers in launching, deploying, and then routinely operating constellations:
•
Monitoring engineering telemetry data from one spacecraft is a rou-
tine task for mission operations personnel and the ground system com-
puter hardware and software systems. However, responding to time-critical
events and identifying, evaluating, and quickly resolving spacecraft subsys-
tem anomalies can frequently be challenging for humans and computers
alike. Effectively monitoring and reacting to conditions reported by the
telemetry data from 100 identical spacecraft without also incurring a con-
comitant and potentially significant increase in staff and ground equipment
will be a major challenge.
•
Spacecraft that compose a constellation still will need to communicate
with the ground system. Commands must be uplinked to the spacecraft,
engineering health and safety telemetry data must be transmitted to the
missions operations center, and payload data must be returned to the
science community for ground-based processing and product distribution.
Available (and limited) ground resources (e.g., spacecraft tracking stations,
communications networks, and computing resources) will need to be sched-
uled and managed so that realistic contact plans can be created to sup-
port forward and return link telemetry processing for constellations with
large numbers of spacecraft. Potentially, advanced space networking tech-
nologies will lead to more ecient networked communications capabilities,
