Coordinated Target Assignment for Multi-Spacecraft Telescopic Missions

Abstract

Space telescopic missions have been deployed for about half a century. Plenty of information about the characteristics of various asteroids and stars has been collected and analyzed through these missions. While there has been a lot of work done on the individual scheduling of space telescope missions, collaborative or coordinated scheduling of multiple space telescopes is relatively less explored. Coordinated scheduling is important to obtain scientific data in an efficient and robust manner. Therefore, this paper proposes a framework for coordinated target assignment of space telescopic missions that enables different satellites to share objectives of collection of scientific data. The proposed framework considers the cost involved in various scientific data collection activities with relevance to each individual space telescope. Satellite workload constraints and possibility of occurrence of faults have also been considered. Performance of the optimal policy calculated using the proposed model has been compared with a rule-based target assignment policy and superiority of the proposed approach has been demonstrated.