Hacker News Reader

A few years back I attended a course on spacecraft operations at ESA. The instructor had a quite inspiring goal for operations: maximizing mission output.

He kind of touches upon it in the talk with the TV-SAt 1 situation where operations really got to be creative and find some solution to learn about the problem. Other great examples of this mindset are the quite successful Mars rovers, the Voyager spacecrafts and the Huygens probe.

View on HN

Spacecraft operations typically uses some kind of optimization approach, which often contains some mix of human and automated pieces. It's fundamentally a scheduling problem (in the sense of AI/CS/OR planning and scheduling), but in a complex domain with geometric constraints on several levels (solar angle, pointing, telemetry), other constraints (like fuel and instrument restrictions), and observational goals.

One example of observation planning for an upcoming mission is CLASP (to be used in NISAR, ~2023 launch): https://ai.jpl.nasa.gov/public/projects/clasp/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com