THE SURFACE OPERATIONS FRAMEWORK – TRANSITIONING FROM EARLY ANALOGUE EXPERIMENTS TO FUTURE LUNAR MISSIONS Sebastian Martin(1), Toril Bye Rinnan(2), Mehran Sarkarati(3), Kim Nergaard(4) (1) ESA/ESOC, Robert-Bosch-Straße 5, 64293 Darmstadt, Germany, Email:
[email protected] (2) Solenix Deutschland GmbH, Spreestraße 3, 64295 Darmstadt, Germany, Email:
[email protected] (3) ESA/ESOC, Robert-Bosch-Straße 5, 64293 Darmstadt, Germany, Email:
[email protected] (4) ESA/ESOC, Robert-Bosch-Straße 5, 64293 Darmstadt, Germany, Email:
[email protected] ABSTRACT to assess the financial and technical feasibility of new mission concepts, technologies and studies before This paper provides an overview of a family of possibly advancing them to the next phases of activities performed within the European Space implementation of a mission. Operations Centre (ESOC) to prepare for future robotic As the result of one such concurrent design study in missions on the lunar surface and beyond. 2009, the METERON concept was created. METERON – the Multi-purpose End-To-End Robotics Operations Over the course of nearly a decade, ESOC has been Network – was initiated to prepare for future human and gradually building up expertise for future surface robotic exploration scenarios. These future scenarios operations activities. foresee robotic assets controlled on the surface of Moon This paper describes or Mars, with humans operating those assets from an - the activities and corresponding systems prepared orbiting vehicle or by Earth ground control. The benefit from the ground up before concrete missions were of near real-time remote asset operations is to reduce defined, human risks and cost by not having to land humans and - how we are now covering a range of activities return them from the surface, while still being able to where we have requirements from missions in the control robotic assets with short transmission delays definition phases while continuing to build on from an orbiter.