GROUND SEGMENT AND OPERATIONAL CONCEPT FOR LUNAR AND PLANETARY ROBOTIC MISSIONS

ALTEC facility is becoming an international centre of excellence and candidate Mission Control Center for planetary robotic missions and authors are actually in the process of setting the requirements for the ground segment infrastructure and Mission Control Centre for robotic missions to the Moon and Mars. The paper gives a general overview of the new studies ALTEC is performing to collect knowledge and models necessary to support and lead future robotic planetary missions. After having described a general architecture of the Mission Control Centre the paper highlights deeded tools. Moreover the study verifies the available stations, both national and international, trying to define a versatile network usable for many mission profiles and describing possible constraints. To give an Italian imprint to the Ground Segment, the main infrastructure would be an Italian Ground Station that will manage the whole data transfer, taking into account all missions requirements. Operational concepts are here analyzed considering team composition and interactions proposing a possible configuration for both Moon and Mars scenarios.