Planning the Coverage of Solar System Bodies Under Geometric Constraints

Scheduling the coverage of a celestial body by scientific instruments onboard multiple spacecraft under observational constraints is central in a significant number of current and future missions for the exploration of the solar system. This paper describes the components and algorithms of a software system used to study early-phase mission design or to schedule daily operations of currently in-flight spacecraft. The scheduling problem to solve is usually a large combinatorial problem of which this paper gives a formal model. A discretization process is described, and several ordering algorithms are designed and compared. Experiments show that high-quality schedules can be produced by approaches combining reasoning about rolling, coverage, and priorities.