Multi-Mission Satellite Management

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) are jointly acquiring the next-generation civilian weather and environmental satellite system: the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS).  The Joint Polar Satellite System will replace the afternoon orbit component and ground processing system of the current Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellites (POES) managed by NOAA.  The Joint Polar Satellite System satellites will carry a suite of sensors designed to collect meteorological, oceanographic, climatological, and solar-geophysical observations of the earth, atmosphere, and space. The ground processing system for the Joint Polar Satellite System is known as the Common Ground System (JPSS CGS), and provides command, control, and communications (C3) and data processing and product delivery.  As a multi-mission system, CGS provides combinations of C3, data processing, and product delivery for numerous NASA, NOAA, Department of Defense (DoD), and international missions, such as NASA’s Earth Observation System (EOS), NOAA’s current POES, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA) Global Change Observation Mission – Water (GCOM-W1), and DoD’s Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP).A multi-mission system, CGS provides combinations of C3/DP for numerous NASA, NOAA, DoD, and international missions. In preparation for the next JPSS satellite, CGS improved its multi-mission capabilities to enhance mission operations for larger constellations of earth observing satellites with the added benefit of streamlining mission operations for other NOAA missions. CGS’s multi-mission capabilities allows management all of assets as a single enterprise, more efficiently using ground resources and personnel and consolidating multiple ground systems into one. Sophisticated scheduling algorithms compare mission priorities and constraints across all ground stations, creating an enterprise schedule optimized to mission needs, which CGS executes to acquire the satellite link, uplink commands, downlink and route data to the operations and data processing facilities, and generate the final products for delivery to downstream users. This paper will illustrate the CGS’s ability to manage multiple, enterprise-wide polar orbiting missions by demonstrating resource modeling and tasking, production of enterprise contact schedules for NOAA’s Fairbanks ground station (using both standing and ad hoc requests), deconflicting resources due to ground outages, and updating resource allocations through dynamic priority definitions.