Under a contract with Defence Research & Development Canada (DRDC), GlobVision is developing a generic Constellation Mission Planning System (CMPS) for missions with Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and/or Automatic Identification System (AIS) payloads. CMPS can be customized (through its user interfaces) to support virtually any SAR and/or AIS constellation mission (as well as single-satellite missions) along with spacecraft constraints such as payloads (e.g. duty cycle), in-orbit resources (e.g. memory and power), ground resources (e.g. downlink data rate constraint), etc. Various users submit User Requests (URs) to CMPS that define Areas-Of-Interest (AOIs) or point targets (POIs) that they want to observe using the SAR and/or AIS payloads of the configured constellation (or single-satellite) mission. CMPS will then use advanced and innovative scheduling algorithms to automatically generate an optimized list of SAR imaging, data downlink, and AIS On/Off tasks that maximize the scientific return and accommodate as many URs as possible while ensuring that all the mission/spacecraft constraints are respected.
In determining an optimized schedule of SAR imaging tasks, the CMPS will take into account signal interference within the constellation and from other SAR/radar satellites so that the acquired SAR imagery are guaranteed to have acceptable quality (in terms of signal-to-noise and signal-to-clutter ratios).
In addition to typical URs that are future looking and will be scheduled for a time window called scheduling period (SP) in near future, CMPS also accommodates dynamic URs (for emergency reasons) and schedules them for the current SP.
Finally, CMPS will have state-of-the-art data fusion algorithms to fuse vessel/ship tracks from AIS and SAR and evaluate the fusion performance. It will allow users to view SAR, AIS and fused tracks as well as utilize the generated fusion Performance Evaluation (PE) metrics to enhance their knowledge of the Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) picture. This provides an arena for making more informed decisions when submitting future user requests.