Paper ID: 802 The 16th International Conference on Space Operations 2020

Operations Concepts (OC) (2) OC - 4 ”Operations Automation & Optimazation 2” (4)

Author: Mr. Bryn Orth-Lashley MDA Geospatial Services Inc., , [email protected]

Ms. Camille Decoust MAXAR, Canada, [email protected] Mr. Jeffrey Hemingway MDA Systems Ltd, Canada, jeff[email protected] Mr. Alan Thompson MDA Systems Ltd, Canada, [email protected] Mr. Andrew Tharmaratnam MDA Systems Ltd, Canada, [email protected] Mr. Will Richardson-Little MDA Systems Ltd, Canada, [email protected] Mr. Philippe Rolland MDA Geospatial Services Inc., Canada, [email protected] Ms. Jamie Roberts MDA Geospatial Services Inc., Canada, [email protected]

TURNING CHALLENGES INTO OPPORTUNITIES: ADAPTIVE MANAGEMENT IN CONSTELLATION MISSION OPERATIONS DEVELOPMENT

Abstract On June 12, 2019 SpaceX launched the RADARSAT Constellation Mission (RCM), a trio of radar Earth observation satellites for the Canadian government with the main objectives of maritime surveil- lance, environmental monitoring, and disaster management. Building on the legacy of RADARSAT-1 and RADARSAT-2, this mission leverages Canada’s role as pioneering innovators in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems but with new modes and increased coverage and revisit frequency as a result of the constellation system. It also leverages the operational experience and expertise of a mixed govern- ment and private industry team currently operating RADARSAT-2, NEOSSat, M3MSat, and SCISAT, which resulted in a seamless Launch and Early Operations (LEOP) campaign and a highly successful Commissioning phase with only minimal operational delays. Of course this success was not achieved without challenges and steps were taken to proactively conceive plans for avoiding, mitigating, and overcoming these challenges. As with many space missions, increas- ingly complex systems that are moving towards automation with higher numbers of integrated components delivered by an international set of contractors (with the added complexity of a multi-satellite constel- lation space segment) present a unique set of challenges for operations development. Another common feature among space missions is the limited involvement of the operations team during design, develop- ment, and integration of the system. Typically the operations development team is delivered a system after the Integration, Validation, and Testing (IVT) phase that meets the design requirements, but does not necessarily address operational needs or constraints. Compounding this challenge are the schedule constraints and squeezed budget margins by this phase of the program, which limit the ability to address the operational deficits. This means that many ground segment software features are not tested beyond the nominal operational flow, resulting in unexpected behaviour for the operators.

1 This paper will present some of the challenges that were encountered during operations development for RCM and how through proactive planning and responsive management our testing, training, vali- dation, and exercises established a successful, flight-proven operations segment baseline for the launch and commissioning of RCM. The objective is to provide program managers and operations development leads with a toolkit of effective strategies and lessons learned for planning, costing, and staffing future operations development projects, a topic not typically covered in literature. RCM is a Government of Canada-owned mission, built by prime contractor MDA and subcontractor Magellan Aerospace Winnipeg (MAW), which is being operated by MDA and subcontractor SED for the first year of operations. It consists of three C-Band SARs separated in orbit by 120 degrees, resulting in a four-day revisit period. This provides critical information to Canadian government departments with applications ranging from Arctic sea ice monitoring to agriculture and forest monitoring to ship detection. The system was designed, built, and integrated across Canada with some equipment supplied by European and US companies. The space segment was built by MAW (bus) and MDA Montreal (payload), with the spacecraft integrated and tested at MDA Montreal. The ground segment software was developed in Vancouver (tasking and production subsystems) and Halifax (tasking subsystems and core ground segment end-to-end testing), eventually being integrated with end-to-end testing at the Mission Control Centre of the . The last phase of integration at the Mission Control Centre was made more complicated by the fact that the core ground segment needed to be integrated and tested with the external ground systems (e.g. S/X-band stations, antenna reservation system, government long-term archiving system) for the first time. This resulted in the integrated ground segment being delivered after the start of the operations de- velopment phase. However, this challenge also presented an opportunity for the operations development to be integrated into the IVT phase. Ultimately adaptive management of the operations development plan led to an operationally manageable system and a successful LEOP and Commissioning campaign. This paper will discuss this parallelization of the IVT and operations development phases and how the operations team was able to create a development and training environment in lieu of the delayed ground segment. It will also explain why future programs should always parallelize these two phases. The operations development phase was divided into three sub-phases: SOVT (testing of flight STOL procedures), cross-system training, and ER (writing manual procedures and exercising them using a range of scenarios on the integrated system). This paper will present these three sub-phases in terms of concrete objectives, planning, timelines, duration, number of participants, and lessons learnt. It will also outline how these phases allowed information to be fed back into IVT, allowing for more flexibility and adaptability in refining the system for operations. This will necessarily cover the tensions that result from varying operational approaches between design intentions and operational experience and how these tensions were navigated through compromise. This paper will also discuss the unique challenges and benefits of our integrated operations team, which drew from members of all phases of the mission with varying degrees of operational experience. Ultimately the wide-range of expertise from software engineering to spacecraft operations allowed for quick responses to issues as they arose during operations development. It will also present the key team skills that were valuable to operations development and the organizational structure that allowed these skills to be fully utilized.

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