SORCE Daylight Only Operations

On July 30, 2013 the Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment spacecraft entered into a new phase of mission operations when the degraded battery could no longer support the main computer through eclipse. Contrary to expectations at the time, this event did not mark the end of the successful SORCE mission, but instead the beginning of a new phase of operations. To save the spacecraft, the mission operations team had to quickly and efficiently address the spacecraft’s fundamental needs every orbit. Responding to this anomaly was a combined effort from the mission operations team at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, Orbital-ATK technical support team, project management at NASA Goddard, and last, but not least the White Sands Communication Network schedulers. Seven months later the flight operations team at LASP deployed new flight software to restore the spacecraft to full-time science operations. The culmination of this work is a resourceful operations concept, called SORCE Daylight-Only Operations that has succeeded in extending the solar spectral irradiance and total solar irradiance climate records. This paper will address the work surrounding the design and implementation of a new operations concept for an end-of-life spacecraft with challenging hardware limitations.