BepiColombo is an interdisciplinary ESA mission to explore the planet Mercury in cooperation with JAXA. The mission consists of two separate orbiters: ESA’s Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and JAXA’s Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO), which are dedicated to the detailed study of the planet and its magnetosphere. The MPO scientific payload comprises eleven instruments packages covering different disciplines developed by several European teams. This paper describes the questionnaire technique followed by the Science Ground Segment (SGS) to get feedback from each individual instrument team about important issues for the SGS systems engineering, which support the SGS development and operations. The conclusions of the questionnaire process allowed the optimization of the Science Ground Segment development processes and resources by answering the real expectations from the instrument teams, the definition of the interfaces between the SGS and each individual team and a science operations and data handling and archiving concepts compatible with their needs.

Date Published: 5 August 2014
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 9150, Modeling, Systems Engineering, and Project Management for Astronomy VI, 915027 (5 August 2014); doi: 10.1117/12.2056338

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9150:
Modeling, Systems Engineering, and Project Management for Astronomy VI
George Z. Angeli; Philippe Dierickx, Editor(s)