A Ground Control System for CBERS 3 and 4 Satellites

The ground control of the third and fourth China-Brazil Earth Resources Satellites (CBERS 3 and 4) will be carried out by a new system under development at INPE. This system will include new technologies to reduce cost s and development time of future ground system projects, through shared or adaptable softwa re. Taking advantage of the experience gained in earlier ground control systems, the entit ies related to satellite operations activities have been modeled as metadata. This modeling approach will increase the systemss reusability, reducing the efforts required to make changes. Whenever modeling costs of entities via metadata have been become unfeasible, their programming interfaces have been defined by Design Patterns in order to facilitate f uture changes. Furthermore, the telecommand and telemetry subsystems architecture includes a processing kernel, which can be shared with EGSE and satellite simulation softwa re. This architecture also foresees the inclusion of CCSDS communication link protocols in other INPE satellite missions. In the future, this system will be upgraded to include Art ificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, like Planning, to prepare flight operation plans for the routine phase of the missions. The engineers in charge of planning the satellite opera tions will use tools developed with Dynamic Object Model technology to define the opera tions activities. Through the high-level script language supplied by these tools, the engine ers will be able to define and/or change the knowledge database of operations activities, withou t requiring specific software development for each satellite. In addition, these tools will m ake it easier to define planning goals and to edit existing planning to deal with non-routine ope rations activities. The operations plan will have actions that are automatically executed by the system, as well as actions that are manually executed by human operators. This paper presents the modeling of the operations entities to increase the satellite control systems reusability and provide software that may be used by the control center, testing (EGSE), and sim ulation systems. This paper also shows how the Dynamic Object Model and AI technologies will be added to the system in order to automate the control center operations, thereby red ucing operations cost.