MOC data transfer and storage

(Note: Adapted from Planck Collaboration 2011, A&A 536, A1)

The mission operations centre (MOC), located at ESA’s operations centre in Darmstadt (Germany), is responsible for all aspects of flight control and of the health and safety of the Planck satellite, including both instruments. It plans and executes all necessary satellite activities, including instrument commanding requests by the instrument operations centres. MOC communicates with the satellite using ESA’s 35-m antenna located in New Norcia (Australia) over a daily 3-h period, during which it uplinks a scheduled activity timeline which is autonomously executed by the satellite, and downlinks the science and housekeeping (HK) data acquired by the satellite during the past 24 h. The downlinked data are transferred from New Norcia to the MOC over a period of typically 8 h; at MOC they are put onto a data server from where they are retrieved by the two Data Processing Centres.