Soil Moisture Active Passive: Flying A Spacecraft From Home

Abstract

During the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic, the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) spacecraft was flown almost entirely from the homes of operations personnel. SMAP is a science spacecraft mission, measuring soil moisture, its freeze/thaw state, and other parameters on a global scale to support weather forecasting, disaster response and climate research. Institutional pandemic response protocols at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) prescribed that only mission critical and mission essential work may be performed on-site. Fortuitously, automation is a defining characteristic of SMAP operations. Ground systems are used to automate routine tasks but not to replace or replicate the technical expertise of human operators. Nominal operations are repetitive, occur around the clock, and automation allows them to be low cost. Potential contingency scenarios were assessed. Consequences of lost or degraded capability of major mission system elements were evaluated. In particular, the impacts of progressively reduced availability of ground antenna stations were considered. Operational adjustments were made to conduct nearly all functions remotely. Naturally, all meetings were conducted online, and chat rooms were set up. For the infrequent real-time operations, an uplink team of two was deployed to the mission ops center, and all other participants remotely monitored the telemetry and systems. The project policy that all manual uplinks must be performed on-site by two persons was retained. Maneuvers, normally performed on-site with support from several system and sub-system operators, were now performed completely remotely by activating one of a set of pre-loaded maneuver sequences. Despite the situation, significant non-routine activities were accomplished to address anomalies and programmatic needs. A major upgrade of the ground data system was performed, replacing aging hardware and updating obsolete software, although on a longer timeline than originally planned. An innovative parallel operations architecture was used to validate functionality and performance of the upgraded system, while still operating on the legacy system. Similarly, the flight system testbed needed to be upgraded, with the configuration swapped multiple times to accommodate testing and other programmatic needs. The spacecraft experienced a significant corruption of the non-volatile memory. Diagnosis and recovery using new tools were performed almost entirely from home. In summary, SMAP remote operations during the pandemic have been and continue to be highly successful. These experiences have demonstrated that much of the operations may actually be conducted remotely.