OBCPs - an integrated part of the BepiColombo autonomy and flexibility

Abstract

On-Board Control Procedures (OBCPs) are self-standing procedures executed autonomously on-board of the spacecraft. They are started via ground command, mission time line, or by events generated on-board. OBCPs are used as a supplement to the on-board software, to act as intelligent procedures for routine on-board operations and to increase spacecraft on-board autonomy. BepiColombo, being in collaboration with ISAS/JAXA the 5th cornerstone mission of the ESA Cosmic Vision scientific program, is an Interdisciplinary Mission to the planet Mercury of Japan with Astrium GmbH as space segment prime. It consists of two scientific orbiters, the Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO), which are dedicated to the detailed study of the planet and of its magnetosphere. OBCP are excellently suited for mastering the complexity and operational demands of this deep space mission in a challenging environment. They are used to optimize mission operations (e.g. by saving bandwidth for regular operation) and to implement operational sequences which are known in detail only at a late stage of the project with a high flexibility to modify them, if necessary, even during the mission. The BepiColombo OBCPs can be loaded into a dedicated storage area of the on-board memory at any time prior or during the mission and when invoked, are executed in an interpreter environment provided by the on-board SW. The OBCP interpreter environment provides a very powerful language, OBCP priority and resource management allowing parallel execution of OBCP's. The OBCP development is completely independent from the on-board software apart from the fact that the services to load and execute OBCPs are needed. As a key asset OBCP design and development must remain as simple as possible in order to shorten their development process. In BepiColombo a new approach will be applied for the OBCP development using an integrated OBCP & FCP development environment called MOIS (Manufacturing and Operations Information System). MOIS is a tool suite to create, develop and validate operational procedures which employs the spacecraft reference database (SRDB) in the editing process thus ensuring consistency of the telemetry and telecommand information used. MOIS supports export of the procedures in various execution environments for manual and automatic execution of mission control system and in its latest version also automatic OBCP code generation, a major step towards a fast and efficient OBCP development. For mission operations this combination provides an excellent chance to optimize efficiently between operations remaining on ground or for deferred on-board operation depending on the mission context and cost efficiency. © 2012 by Astrium GmbH.