Clouds Handling for Planning of Optical Space Missions

Every space mission which uses optical band, e.g. ground-satellite/satellite-ground laser telecommunication, optical earth observation, on-ground optical space debris tracking system, is drastically affected by clouds in the troposphere of the Earth. Mission planning group of the German Space Operations Center (GSOC), DLR is investigating the possibility of achieving the maximum performance of future optical space missions. Planning of an optical space mission has to involve clouds cover data. Relevant long-term past data from ECMWF (UK) and short-term predicted data from NOAA (USA) in standard GRIB format were used for this work. Short-term predicted future data are helpful for operational planning of an on-ground station and the relevant satellite. Long-term past data can be used to design an optimal network of on-ground stations and to assess the performance of the whole mission. Several methods of time-interpolation of the clouds cover data were compared with and without using wind information, a corresponding software tool was developed. I