Science Opportunity Analyzer - Not Just Another Pretty Face
Barbara Streiffert, C. Polanskey · Space OPS 2004 Conference · 2004
Cassini, a mission to Saturn, is the first Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) mission to have distributed science operations.Prior to this time all operations tasks were performed at the Laboratory by operations and spacecraft engineers.Of course, the uplink software to support operations has been written with the engineering community in mind.In addition, these tools run on workstations behind firewalls.Now the scientists were going to have a larger role in creating and specifying their experiments.This group needed software tools that allowed them to accurately visualize these experiments and also get ancillary data about them, but the software also needed to flow easily into the other project uplink software being used by the engineers.Science Opportunity Analyzer (SOA) was created to bridge the gap.Currently, there are visualization tools that provide views of the solar system either as still shots or some form of animation.Some of these tools can show an instrument's field of view (aperture) projected onto a celestial body or the sky.Some provide ancillary data about the display or the spacecraft.No tool provided them all.However, SOA accurately provides all of these capabilities and performs geometric searches for observation opportunities and constraint checking as well.