The MARS system is a globally-distributed, real-time system designed to create, view, edit, coordinate, and execute worldwide satellite communication schedules. The MARS system is used to ingest orbital information as well as requests from users, provide human schedulers with a highly flexible interface to optimize the schedule, and distribute the information to users and the automated antenna. In addition, MARS is built on a scheduling engine which automatically deconflicts the schedule reducing a human operator’s cognitive load by over 90%.
Real-Time Capabilities
• Handles real-time space-related equipment failures and in-space emergencies
• Real-time conflict checking
• Facilitates real-time schedule changes
• Multiple distributed users working in parallel
• Automatic schedule change alerts
• Real-time notification, acknowledgement, and monitoring of acknowledgement timing
Automatic Satellite Communication Scheduling
• Satellite Control Network (SCN)
• Managed Intelligent Deconfliction and Scheduling (MIDAS)
• Maximizes number and duration of supports
• Hundreds of satellites, thousands of supports, and other tasks
• Dozens of separate, competing constellations / SOCs
• 24-hour schedule generated in minutes
• Both hard and soft constraints
Fault Tolerance
• Robustness against machine and communications failures
• Hot backups
• Automatic node fallover and recover
• Activity logging
• Data archiving
• Equipment failure reporting
Other Capabilities
• Schedule quality assessment
• Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) Investigation
• Individual task creations, deletion, and editing
• User-to-user communication
• Distributed, fully-connected network