XMM Mission Planning: ISO revisited?

A.J.C. McDonald, G. Gienger, R. Kresken, C.G. Petersen
amcdonal@esoc.bitnet
ESA, logica

Abstract:
During the early months of the mission, ESA's Infra-red Space Observatory (ISO) 
has demonstrated the reliability and efficiency of the mission planning process: 
a process charcterised by interacting groups of users and operators as well as 
tight time scales for completing all the planned observations. In developing, 
under tight budgetary constraints, the mission planning concept for the X-Ray 
Multi-Mirror Mission (XMM), it is only natural to look critically at the ISO 
system to identify areas of commonality, and to re-use ISO designs and software 
wherever applicable.

This paper reviews briefly the operations concepts of the ISO and XMM missions. 
There follows a short description of the ISO mission planning process. 
Comparisons are then drawn between the ISO system and that proposed for XMM. 
As will be seen, while the overall process shows longer observation intervals for 
XMM, move the operations concept away from a rigidly pre-planned approach with 
automated commanding toward one which allows greater flexibility and manual 
intervention.

Although the roles of the science and operations teams are discussed, detailed 
technical descriptions are limited ot the areas affecting the Flight Dynamics 
development at ESOC. In particular, whereas the ISO project maintains a small 
dedicated team of Flight Dynamics specialists producing a flight dynamics system 
which the speacecraft controller is capable of using for restricted mission 
planning activities.