Real-time decision support system for space missions control

Space weather refers to conditions on the sun and in the solar wind, magnetosphere, ionosphere, and thermosphere that can influence the performance and reliability of space-borne and ground-based technological systems and that affect human life or health[1]. Such influence is particularly strong on spacecrafts by reducing the mission lifetime and causing long periods of instrument's unavailability. Understanding the cause-effect relation between space weather events and spacecrafts anomalies is a very important task but also a very complex one, which requires a multidisciplinary approach and is a long-term goal. Meanwhile, nowadays most mission control teams are supported by different and non-integrated systems providing telemetry and space weather information. However, they require better information availability, integrating space weather and spacecraft data, including past, current and forecasted data. This paper outlines a decision support system which in addition to the data integration, also provides efficient tools to analyse off-line data, monitor real-time space weather and spacecraft parameters and events, infer spacecraft anomalous conditions based on the uninterrupted real-time analysis of the spacecraft status parameters and to build predictions for any space weather or spacecraft parameter through the use of artificial neuronal networks and physical models. Such a system is under development for the European Space Agency control centre.