ESA's SMART-1 science planning concept and its evolution throughout the mission

Abstract

SMART-1 is the first ESA lunar mission and was primarily built to test a novel solarelectrical propulsion system and a set of miniaturized instruments during its long cruise phase en route to the Moon. Nevertheless, possessing a handful of advanced scientific instruments, it was able to become an important science mission after Moon arrival at the end of 2004. The Science planning concept, being first drawn from a generic concept devised in ESA's Research and Scientific Support Department (RSSD) for all ESA planetary missions, had to be slightly modified due to the very special nature of this project. Being the first of a series of ESA low cost missions, the tight budget directed SMART-1 to use planning tools developed by bigger ESA planetary missions. This approach made powerful tools available for SMART-1 that wouldn't be possible otherwise, however their development was not always guided by SMART-1 and as a consequence essential developments had to be implemented in parallel to the routine mission phase. The second strong constraint on the planning comes from the fact that only spare time from other missions is available for SMART-1 communications. This creates extra difficulties on the mission planning, as ground station availability is only known one week before the spacecraft pointing requests are frozen. The targeted oriented nature of the mission, and the operational constraints imposed by the communications passes makes it impossible to make a solid plan much in advance. The short time frames to prepare operations and the evolving tools, guided the SMART-1 Science Operations Coordination Centre (STOC) to develop a flexible science planning concept where it should be possible to respond quick and adapt almost immediately tool evolutions. In order to achieve the goals proposed the STOC had to choose a centralised approach, where experiment teams provide the scientific goals and the operations needed to achieve such goals. The STOC then has to identify where in the mission the operations to achieve the desired science are available and propose a high level operational timeline to the experiment teams. This centralised approach and identification of valid science opportunities based on science goals decreases considerably the number of iterations needed in a planning cycle and as a consequence the planning time, making it possible to match the SMART-1 time constraints. This paper will describe the SMART-1 planning concept, its evolution, and the impact such evolution had on the planned operations, and consequently science return. © 2006 by VEGA Group PLC. and the European Space Agency.