Development of effective and efficient operations for NASA's Soil Moisture Active Passive mission

Abstract

NASA's Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) is an earth orbiting mission which launched 1/31/2015, successfully completed an aggressive Commissioning plan, and is currently collecting Science data. A 90-day, activity-rich Launch and Commissioning Phase required 7 days per week operations with heavy staffing. It was followed by a steep ramp down to a very small operations team performing mostly unattended (“lights out”) operations. Completing Commissioning ahead of schedule despite major inflight anomalies was made possible by transitioning development experts into operations, preparing sequences for all baseline activities and selected contingency scenarios prior to Launch, and developing tools to streamline routine activities (sequence generation/validation, data management, telemetry query and reporting, long term trending). Powerful operations analysis tools coupled with development experience allowed the team to quickly troubleshoot, work around, and recover from a variety of significant anomalies (including several safemode entries) and still maintain schedule. To enable lights out operation, SMAP developed a reliable infrastructure relying heavily on automation. Orbit determination was successfully automated to simplify Navigation. Automatic command generation and radiation was implemented for benign routine commanding. This capability was phased in during Commissioning, and now accounts for 95-100% of SMAP commanding during the week. SMAP also developed reliable autonomous monitoring and notification systems for non-receipt of data, detection of anomalous data, and auto-commanding failures. Upon detection of problems, SMAP uses a role-based email/text notification tool to disposition anomalies. These capabilities allow the SMAP mission operations center to be largely unattended. System engineers are cross-trained to perform numerous tasks including command radiation, scheduling, and sequence integration and testing. Choosing simplification over optimization allows most tasks to be performed by a handful of people. These are some of the efficiencies that have enabled successful small team operations in the Science Phase.