Planck operational state history

Planck operational state history

The Planck Operational State History (POSH) provides an easily accessible summary of the status of the Planck spacecraft, throughout the course of its mission. It should be useful to scientists as a complement to the data they are analysing.

Due to the type and quantity of data that describe the state of a satellite and its instruments, it is common for them to be spread over a large number of files and formats which may have to be retrieved from a large number of systems. In addition there are a significant number of potentially interesting occurrences during the mission which are not found in any one single repository; examples are mission milestones, definitions of operational days and anomalous events. The POSH provides the state of the spacecraft and its instruments in an easily accessible way at any given time. States included are the operational phases and the operational status/mode of each of the major payload components. The intention being that this information could be used to assist not only in the operational work in monitoring the status of the survey but also as a data source that could be consulted whilst analyzing science data.

Two main record types are stored in the POSH, as now described.

• EVENTS, consisting of occurrences during the mission that can be described by a start and end time (e.g. survey boundaries, anomalies, ODs, manoeuvres). The definition of an event is provided for operational purposes; it may or may not agree with the definition of an event for data analysis purposes (e.g. the boundaries of a survey may be defined in a different way in the pipeline).

Screen capture of the events table of the POSH displayed with topcat.

• HOUSE KEEPING (HK) SUMMARY, which consists of some HK timelines with one data point per pointing period (e.g., temperatures, positions on the sky, drift rates, and sun angles). This data set contains a very compact operational summary of the mission (not an exhaustive list of HK).
  

  Distance of the S/C from the sun as a function time as provided in the H/K summary of the POSH, displayed with topcat.

The full data set and accompanying documentation can be downloaded here