STEPS TOWARDS AN OPERATIONAL SENSORS NETWORK PLANNING FOR SPACE SURVEILLANCE

GMV has been gaining momentum in the application of Mission Planning and Scheduling techniques within the domain of Space Surveillance and Tracking due to the company’s involvement in the European Space Situational Awareness programme with the European Space Agency. A Telescopes Scheduling Simulator tool has been developed within the scope of the Telescopes Analysis and Design activity which has recently ended with the successful delivery of a configurable telescope network simulator. The tool is capable of performing optimal optical sensor scheduling, from the computation of potential visibilities and observation opportunities, by ingesting and further refining an initial catalogue of manmade objects. It performs its core scheduling process on a rules based inference engine, allowing the user to edit the rules files to optimize planning results. It also provides a performance analysis module to aid the user in the design of an efficient network of global telescopes for SSA. Based on this previous experience, currently on-going activity in collaboration with the Planning and Learning Group (PLG) of Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Sensor Planning Services for the SSA Prototype Tasking and Data Centres, is a more ambitious initiative to develop a pre-operational planning system, a precursor service for the future SSA network of sensors which performs the scheduling for ground and space based, optical and radar sensors. Providing a mixed-initiative planning system, it uses a domainindependent automatic planning engine that can be easily extended to accommodate different types of sensors, as scheduling requirements evolve in the future operational phase of the SSA Programme. The purpose of this paper is to expose the technologies behind these two approaches, taking into account the benefits and pitfalls of both and focusing on system performance and scalability to provide a set of conclusions that may be used as design drivers for similar systems.