Create concepts for truly re-usable mission operations artefacts serving mission families and exploring disruptive approaches minimsing effort, time-to-deliver and operating costs of ground segments

 

A significant level of commonality has been achieved across ESA missions belonging to the same category. This applies to the space segment (e.g. Generic platforms, reference architectures), to the ground segment (e.g. Generic solutions for ground data systems, shared space-ground communication network) and to the space-ground interfaces (e.g. Communication, protocol and service level standards). However, such a big level of commonality has not enabled yet a drastic reduction of the engineering efforts involved in the ground segment set-up, in that effort-intensive processes are still repeated for every mission.

This activity aims to investigate techniques to enable seamless re-use of the main artefacts serving mission operations across missions relying on largely common space segments. The resulting concept is expected to cover the areas where the majority of the mission preparation efforts are currently devoted, namely: development, validation, integration and production of operations artefacts. Achieving a drastic reduction of the efforts involved in these processes may involve a complete re-thinking of the approach currently adopted in several areas, such as: i) Ground data systems design (e.g. By introducing a clear separation between common and mission specific elements), ii) Operational simulators design (e.g. To use a shared library of space segment models), iii) Ground segment deployment (e.g. To share run-time systems across missions) and iv) Mission operations model (e.g. To introduce sufficient abstraction in the operations design to enable seamless re-use of e.g. Procedures across missions).

This activity encompasses the following tasks:

- Analyse the areas where commonality across missions may lead to significant improvements of the ground segment and mission operations preparation process;

- Create a deployment concept for a scalable set of ground segment systems supporting complete mission families, including Proof-of-concept for Multi-Mission deployment of the main ground data systems

- Define the governance concepts for supporting mission adoptions and extensions in such a system.

- Define a suitable mission operations model and associated supporting technology to enable seamless reuse of mission operations artefacts within a family.