Previously, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) did not allow observations to go beyond the end of a planning period. However, opportunities for observing the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover occur close enough to these boundaries to require the observations that support the rover to cross these boundaries. This requires the observation to be included in two planning cycles.

The program developed in this work accepts input describing the observations schedule for execution during a science planning period. It identifies observations that start during the planning period and end after the planning period. These observations are saved to a file. The program will be incorporated into the MRO Science planning process to aid the MRO Cycle Coordinator in identifying cycle spanning observations. The program is written in Perl and should be able to operate in most commercial environments that support Perl.

This work was done by John M. Diehl of Caltech for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The software used in this innovation is available for commercial licensing. Please contact Dan Broderick at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Refer to NPO-49197.



This Brief includes a Technical Support Package (TSP).
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Program Determines When MRO Observations Span More Than One Spacecraft Sequencing Period

(reference NPO49197) is currently available for download from the TSP library.

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