Advanced Methodologies for Planning and Scheduling Payload Operations for Planetary Exploration Missions

Missions for planetary exploration are unique opportunities to provide very meaningful and high-valuable data about the analysed celestial bodies. These missions can characterize many aspects of them, thanks to the different remote sensing instruments included in their science payload. However, the observations in this context are influenced by complex constraints (e.g., limited resources, environment characteristics) and limitations, thus limiting the availability of acquisition opportunities. Hence, an accurate planning and scheduling of the acquisition operations by the science payload instruments of a Planetary Exploration mission is a crucial task in the mission design. This requires the development of automatic methodologies to aid this delicate phase, which are capable of considering all the different constraints, the science requirements and the characteristics of the instruments in order to produce feasible observation schedules that are optimized with respect to the acquisition quality. In this context, this thesis provides two main contributions related to: i) the analysis and the scheduling of the acquisitions by a single instrument and ii) the extension of the study to the simultaneous scheduling of the observations by multiple instruments. The first novel contribution presents a methodology for the automatic scheduling of the acquisition operations of a single instrument for planetary exploration missions. The presented methodology is based on 2 main phases and it uses a multi-objective optimization technique to produce an acquisition schedule, optimized with respect to the scientific requirements and the characteristics of the considered sensor and the mission constraints. The second contribution addresses the complexity of automatically generating and harmonizing observation schedules for multiple instruments simultaneously. The proposed method models the problem as a bilevel optimization task. At the lower level the acquisition schedule for each sensor is produced and evaluated, considering all the instrument-related requirements and limitations. At the upper level the harmonization of the individual sensor schedules is performed, considering all the mission- and resource-related constraints and maximizing the overall quality and science return. The proposed methods have been applied considering in detail the operations of radar sounder instruments. In particular, the first methodology has been tested on the observations by RIME, radar sounder of the JUICE mission and the second considered RIME and three other instruments of the same missions. The obtained results show the effectiveness of the proposed techniques, which aim at increasing the level of automation in the data acquisition planning and scheduling phase in Planetary Exploration missions.