Young Graduate Trainee
Darmstadt, Germany
In 2022 the ExoMars RSP mission will launch a European Rover and a Russian Surface Platform that will land on the surface of Mars 8 months later. The science mission of the rover is to traverse the Martian surface to search for signs of past or present life. In this project I was part of the ExoMars RSP Flight Control Team during the operations preparation phase of the mission. In support of the typical preparations tasks, such as SVTs, procedure testing and validation, etc., I have been examining the relay communications approach of the mission. This included defining and analysing the relay communications approach with the goal of optimising the sharing of relay overflights between our two landers and thus maximising the science output of the mission. To do this, I programmed a tool that can optimise the allocation of relay passes between our landers, which is to be used operationally during the operations phase of the mission. This includes detailed link budget calculations in order to predict the data volume capabilities of each overflight. The tool is very versatile and is already being used operationally to optimise the relay passes that the TGO is providing to NASAs Perseverance Rover. Additionally the tool has already been used to analyse scenarios for the Mars Sample Return campaign as well. This work naturally included interfacing with NASA and it has given us the capability of producing independent analyses of the full Martian Relay Network.