A few years back I attended a course on spacecraft operations at ESA. The instructor had a quite inspiring goal for operations: maximizing mission output.
He kind of touches upon it in the talk with the TV-SAt 1 situation where operations really got to be creative and find some solution to learn about the problem. Other great examples of this mindset are the quite successful Mars rovers, the Voyager spacecrafts and the Huygens probe.
Spacecraft operations typically uses some kind of optimization approach, which often contains some mix of human and automated pieces. It's fundamentally a scheduling problem (in the sense of AI/CS/OR planning and scheduling), but in a complex domain with geometric constraints on several levels (solar angle, pointing, telemetry), other constraints (like fuel and instrument restrictions), and observational goals.
Related: I saw that Canadian astronaut, Chris Hadfield, is offering a class on "Space Exploration" on the Master Class site. I haven't used MC before, so I cannot attest to the quality of the offering, but it seems interesting.
I bought his master class when MC released it; if you’re into this kind of thing I would highly recommend — Chris is a great resource of experience and knowledge
It's already there, uploaded by the official media.ccc.de account: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TO0VrixLz7U. Please don't upload CCC videos to YouTube on your own. The license permits it, but it's not cool to do so.
Great. I will not, as it already is uploaded there to avoid de-duping. My reasoning was that I find the viewing experience there better, and that place is a better place to search videos later on. But given that video already exists there, there is no reason for me to do it.
The guy is able to very concisely describe what are very complicated concepts... which is even more impressive considering that english probably isn't his first language.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 39.1 ms ] threadHe kind of touches upon it in the talk with the TV-SAt 1 situation where operations really got to be creative and find some solution to learn about the problem. Other great examples of this mindset are the quite successful Mars rovers, the Voyager spacecrafts and the Huygens probe.
One example of observation planning for an upcoming mission is CLASP (to be used in NISAR, ~2023 launch): https://ai.jpl.nasa.gov/public/projects/clasp/
> MC Course Site: https://www.masterclass.com/classes/chris-hadfield-teaches-s...
> Chris Hadfield's 'Space Oddity' music video from ISS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaOC9danxNo