UNIFORM-1 Ground System: Mission Planning, Scheduling, Control, and Data Processing

Mission planning and scheduling is an essential part of satellite operations, and traditional satellites have a big, complex ground system which takes care of their operations planning, resource allocation, scheduling, and so on. As small satellites become more and more complex, their capability have been increased and so has the need of proper planning and control; it is necessary to have a good planning system in order to maximize the functionality of a small satellite by effectively and efficiently utilize its resource. This paper discusses the ground software developed for UNIFORM-1 satellite. The ground software consists of mission planning/scheduling, mission control center, and operations data distribution. All the downlinked operations data are stored in a database and will be used for analyzing the satellite conditions as well as extracting information necessary for addressing when/how much mission data acquisition is available. Combined with the request from the end-user (i.e., those who need to monitor specific target area on Earth for wildfire surveillance), achievable mission plans will be generated. Those operations plans include when image capture will take place, when those data will be downlinked to the ground, etc., and will be automatically converted to operations procedures which is comprehensible by the TT&C software at the control center (MCC). This paper also presents the actual operations plans and the corresponding data obtained from the early-phase operations of UNIFORM-1