An Automatic Planning and Scheduling Method Based on Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithms for Planetary Radar Sounder Observations

Data acquistions performed by instruments in the scientific payload of planetary missions require an accurate planning, for obtaining the expected science return. This paper presents an approach to the automatic planning and scheduling of acquisitions of remote sensing instruments in planetary missions. The approach exploits multi-objective optimization techniques based on Genetic Algorithms (GAs) to produce schedules that are optimized tradeoffs of multiple criteria identifying the quality of the considered acquisition campaign. The approach is general, but in this paper we present it considering radar sounder instruments. Accordingly, we design a few ad-hoc quality metrics for radar sounder (RS) observations and apply the proposed approach to the operations of RIME (Radar for Icy Moons Exploration), which is the radar sounder designed for the JUpiter ICy moons Explorer (JUICE) mission.