This article discusses Vyoma’s development of proprietary mission control capabilities. It was written and produced by Vyoma, a registered participant of the satsearch Trusted Supplier program.
Vyoma is developing its own mission control capabilities to operate its Flamingo satellites out of Munich. Such capabilities are key to the long-term vision of Vyoma: fully autonomous satellite operations.
Successfully designing, building, launching, and operating satellites is complex. Building heritage in space takes time, commitment and resources. It is an endeavour that requires multi-disciplinary expertise from mission analysts, structural, thermal, communications, system and quality assurance engineers, as well as spacecraft operations, astrodynamics, software and infrastructure experts, and many more. Operations itself requires – next to other tools – flight dynamics, mission planning and mission control systems, intrinsically linked to a comprehensive and up-to-date situational picture of space.
A startup – with limited resources by its very nature – thus needs to take make-or-buy decisions with a direct impact on time-to-market, team composition, capital and operational expenditure. The leanest approach would be to procure everything, externalise payload and satellite integration as well as their operations, and focus on commercialization of the payload data only. Vyoma decided to externalise its hardware procurement but build up its own flight dynamics and mission planning systems. Here is why.
Any good make-or-buy decision starts with thorough research on available solutions. The Vyoma Space Programme team evaluated existing solutions but found them to be expensive, and inflexible, usually geared towards operations of a single satellite, and lacking the capabilities to satisfy the complex mission requirements of the Flamingo satellites. A cloud-based, modular, and mission-agnostic product that can easily scale from operations of one-to-many satellites was lacking in the market. Hence, the decision was simple. Still, there are also strategic considerations in developing independent operations capabilities:
- Optimal exploitation of payload and spacecraft resources – One of Vyoma’s goals is to deliver a highly available and frequent, yet affordable picture of the space domain. It achieves this by observing the space traffic in-situ, that is, by taking pictures with telescopes mounted on satellites that can align their pointing to catch passing objects of interest. To achieve a competitive pricing of its surveillance and intelligence services, its assets need to be optimally exploited and achieve a high duty cycle, meaning the cameras should be operational and generate valuable data as often as possible. An optimal exploitation of a sensor considers target priority, predicted signal-to-noise ratio, opportunity costs such as missing out on observing other objects, and satellite platform and orbit-specific constraints from power, memory, and communication opportunities. Such an integrated optimisation of the sensor exploitation can only be achieved within the mission planning system itself. Hence, Vyoma’s sensor-tasking optimiser is – and needs to be – an integral part of its mission planning.
- Prioritisation of customer requests – The observation data that Vyoma provides is used to protect critical space infrastructure, such as communications, weather or navigation satellites. To reliably provide a steady stream of information and intelligence, and to adequately prioritise conflicting observation requests, Vyoma needs to be in full control of its own sensor system, including its operations schedules.
- Reliability of service – Supporting institutional customers in protecting critical infrastructure in space requires a high level of reliability of service. By enforcing risk-based, cybersecurity-informed engineering principles, Vyoma is introducing security by design into its operations. By building its mission control capabilities as fully virtualised solutions ready to be deployed on either cloud and on-premise infrastructure, Vyoma can mirror – and back-up – its operations at multiple locations simultaneously. This dramatically reduces the risk of service outage and increases the resilience of ground systems, ensuring that Vyoma’s services remain operational at all times.
- Adaptable and flexible software – Existing satellite operators already have well-proven and tested systems, but might want to try extensions such as accessing timely situational awareness services. Vyoma provides its capabilities as a Software-as-a-Service. Its modules can easily be integrated into existing operational systems through accessing its application programming interfaces. Alternatively, Vyoma seamlessly integrates existing routines and representations of customer satellites into its own systems using prebuilt modules, making it highly versatile.
- Scalability of fleet operations – Over the following years, Vyoma will build its Flamingo constellation up to 12 satellites, allowing it to regularly observe the majority of space traffic in Low-Earth Orbit every 45 – 50 minutes, and – for objects of high interest – achieve latencies in the order of minutes. Optimising the tasking across many observers and even more customer request is a complex problem to solve, going beyond the capabilities of even the most knowledgeable spacecraft operations experts. Mission control thus needs to be built with scalability in mind, with seamless integration of each new satellite and sensor, and with the aim to reduce the human effort required to operate the constellation.
- Automation of satellite operations – Crucially, Vyoma is working towards a vision where satellites – its own and those of its customers – are operated fully autonomously to maximise their respective mission goals and minimise the effort of the operations team. This can only be achieved if every element of satellite operations is built and designed with automation in mind, paving the way for Vyoma to develop intellectual property in ground-breaking satellite operations capabilities. The operations suite is designed to be adaptable to each unique Concept of Operations, enabling it to incorporate different satellite buses, operational approaches and mission types. The first beneficiary of this automation suite is Vyoma and its Flamingos.
In summary, there are multiple important technical and strategic reasons for Vyoma to develop its own satellite operations system: the lack of suitable existing solutions, to optimise its payload operations, to provide adequate prioritisation and reliable space domain awareness, to scale its constellation, and as a step to achieve full automation in satellite operations. Vyoma, with its near-real-time picture of the space domain is well positioned to link satellite operations with its comprehensive knowledge of the space ahead.
Soon, autonomy in satellite operations will become the norm. However, time is of the essence. A surge in space traffic, explosions and collisions of space objects, and an increase in complexity around the pattern-of-life of satellites require an efficient and resilient approach to operations. The Vyoma team is working with speed and dedication to protect infrastructure in space – its own and that of its customers.
Vyoma is a space debris monitoring company, based in Germany, developing solutions designed to ensure safe passage through space – for everyone. You can find out more about the company here on their satsearch supplier profile.